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OTHER BOOKS BY 
BISHOP McCONNELL 

CHRISTIAN FOCUS 

THE INCREASE OF FAITH 

RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

CHRISTMAS SERMONS 

EDWARD GAYER ANDREWS 

THE DIVINER IMMANENCE 

THE ESSENTIALS OF METHODISM 

UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 



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JPactf it ^tf)ool of 3Eielision» 1920 

Public Opinion and 
Theology 



BY 

FRANCIS JOHN McCONNELL 

Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK. CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1920, by 
FRANCIS JOHN McCONNELL 



@)CI.A570204 
JUN-I 1920 



TO PRESIDENT CHARLES SUMNER NASH 

WISE ADVOCATE OF THE UNION OF THE 

CHURCHES; HIMSELF A TYPE OF THE 

MIND AND SPIRIT WHICH WILL 

MAKE UNION POSSIBLE 



THE E. T. EARL LECTURESHIP 



The purpose of the foundation is to 
aid in securing at Berkeley, the seat of 
the University of Cahfornia, as the 
center of secular learning for California, 
the adequate presentation of Christian 
truth, by bringing to Berkeley, Califor- 
nia, year by year, eminent Christian 
scholars to lecture upon themes cal- 
culated to illustrate and disseminate 
Christian thought, and minister to 
Christian life; thus serving the purpose 
of a high evangelism. 



CONTENTS 

Part I 
Some Real Gains 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Introductory 13 

II. The Divine Responsibility 32 

III. Responsible to Whom ? 50 

IV. God and Man and the Daily Task . . 67 
V. Publicity in the Kingdom of God ... 86 

VI. The Divine Friendship 109 

VII. Provision for Rescue 129 

Part II 
Some Steadying Factors 

VIII. The Individual 153 

IX. The Church and Society 175 

X. The Book of Rebellion and Freedom 197 

XI. Jesus 218 

XII. The Christlike God 239 



PART I 
SOME REAL GAINS 



CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTORY 

How can we adjust the claims of Chris- 
tianity to be an absolutely binding religious 
system to a day which lays increasing stress 
upon the popular will as the only source of 
authority in society? Dogmatists of op- 
posed types are ready with an answer. One 
declares that the problem is really no prob- 
lem at all since the voice of the people is the 
voice of God. The dogmatist of the other 
camp oracularly replies that the sovereignty 
of the kingdom of God has right of way over 
all popular decrees whatsoever. 

The dictum that the voice of the people 
is the voice of God does not help us much. 
It is very difficult to prevail upon the radical 
expounders of popular sovereignty to tell us 
what they mean by the voice of the people. 
A swarm of questions arise to our lips as this 
dictum is urged upon us. Who are the 
people? Is the term to be made all-in- 
clusive? How are we to justify popular 

13 



14 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

aberrations and excesses with the claim of 
divinity for a popular utterance? When 
the champion of divine sovereignty insists 
upon the absolute sway of the God of Chris- 
tianity we are beset by a no smaller swarm 
of questions than before. We all know that 
the idea of God is influenced and modified 
and even definitely shaped by the peculiar- 
ities of the times in which men live. Plainly, 
we cannot get far as long as we give heed 
to the dogmatists alone. 

Suppose we begin by looking at some 
ways in which popular thinking does un- 
questionably modify the rehgious concep- 
tions of men. For the sake of at least 
getting a start we will think of society in 
its broadest terms as consisting of a mass of 
persons of enough Hke-mindedness to live 
together fairly well as one of the major 
groups hke a conmaonwealth or a nation, or 
even as a larger group that we have in mind 
when we speak of the civilized world or of 
Christendom as a whole. How does the 
spirit of such a group aflFect progress in 
thinking about God? 

The most definite manner in which a 
social group might bring its influence to bear 



INTRODUCTORY 15 

upon religious thinking would be in the en- 
actment of law. Law-making is perhaps 
the most definite and concrete form of so- 
cial activity. Let us imagine ourselves 
dealing with a community in which the 
passage of laws marks definite achievement 
of the popular will, the laws not being the 
decrees of an autocrat nor the edicts of an 
ohgarchy or a bureaucracy. In such a com- 
munity the passage of laws would affect 
men's ideas of religion both directly and in- 
directly. Suppose that the practice of the 
suttee, or the burning of the widow at the 
funeral of the husband, had been abohshed 
by vote of the Indian peoples themselves, 
then the enactment of the law would have 
had a double significance. It would have 
marked the stage in Indian thinking at 
which the majority of the people had be- 
come convinced of the wrong of the suttee 
and had dehberately determined to put it 
away. The observance of the law, too, 
would have meant that a horrible rite which 
could have caused only the deadening of the 
sensibihties of the people was to be a com- 
mon spectacle no longer. Henceforward 
religious thinking would move in a more 



16 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

human and humane atmosphere from the 
very fact that one abomination had ceased to 
be. So with popular legislation prohibiting 
polygamy, or the sale of harmful liquor or 
drugs. By this powerful exercise of the 
popular will in lawmaking all thought in the 
community is directly or indirectly affected, 
rehgious thought as well as any other kind. 
Say as much as we please about the force of 
abstract thinking, we know that all thinking 
is colored by the concrete images which actu- 
ally meet our eyes. The simple considera- 
tion that, by the progressive enactment of 
legislation involving more and more the 
main ethical principles, we do not have to 
look upon so many horrible spectacles as we 
once did has meaning for our rehgious 
thinking. 

We mention this phase of the signifi- 
cance of legislation for rehgion because in 
these days of separation of church and 
state, when few laws directly bearing on re- 
hgion are passed, we are apt to ignore the 
indirect effect of many laws. A law is a 
deed of the people and a rule by which the 
people act. The law which says nothing 
about rehgion may by the type of social ac- 



INTRODUCTORY 17 

tivity which it registers and fosters do im- 
measurable good for religion. 

A second channel through which popular 
opinion influences theological discussions is 
the creation of a demand for certain types 
of ideas or for certain modes of expression 
of ideas. One who has any large experience 
of churches knows that religious thinkers do 
inevitably to a greater or less degree adjust 
themselves to the demands of congregations. 
The influence of a congregation itself upon 
preaching never has been adequately ex- 
pounded. We all know, however, that be 
the prophet of God ever so devoted, and his 
message ever so original, he must get his 
truth into statements that fit in with the 
modes of thought of the people to whom he 
makes his appeal. Now, anything that 
shapes those modes of thought will in the 
end have its influence on the utterance of 
the prophet. It would be almost impossible 
to get a hearing in rehgious circles to-day 
for the type of rehgious utterance of a thou- 
sand years ago, or even of a hundred years 
ago. If a social group, for example, has 
heard enough of scientific teaching to be 
under the sway of complete emphasis on 



18 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

what we call natural law, it will be very un- 
likely that a teacher who lays stress on 
miracle will attract much attention. If the 
times through which particular groups are 
passing are predominantly tragic, theology 
inevitably will take on a somber hue. It 
would have been manifestly absurd to ex- 
pect much hght play of fancy or much 
leisurely speculation from theologians writ- 
ing just at the close of the Thirty Years' 
War, or from the Pilgrim Fathers strugghng 
with the bleakness of a New England 
winter. To be sure, the efficacy of a proph- 
et's teaching cannot be judged by the size 
of his audiences. But before the prophet 
can affect the hfe of any time he must speak 
the language of that time ; and the language 
of a time may be molded by forces over 
which the prophet does not have the least 
control. The teacher finds himself inescap- 
ably noting what his hearers Hsten to, and he 
frames his message more and more with the 
aim of compelhng their attention, just as 
the author of the rehgious book has to con- 
sider what the pubhsher will pubhsh and the 
buyer will buy. 

This is not to suggest anything unworthy 



INTRODUCTORY 19 

in the province of religious teaching. We 
are certainly not trying to beUttle the indi- 
vidual. But social cohesiveness makes the 
power of the individual possible, and the 
social constitution gives the individual his 
chance. Those who understand their own 
times most deeply are very likely those who 
will influence the remoter times most pro- 
foundly. In fact, that vague and almost 
mystic something which we call the spirit 
of an age — ^produced as it is by the utter- 
ances of hundreds of preachers or by the 
play of myriads of physical and spiritual 
forces upon the masses, causing the multi- 
tudes to half -think or half -feel the same 
thing at the same time — never comes to its 
full force until a leader incarnates the spirit 
in his own Hfe and speech. Some theolog- 
ical utterances are achievements of a whole 
age or period in the world's hfe. 

The situation here is somewhat parallel 
to that in the field of physical discovery. 
We would not seek to minimize the his- 
toric significance of Christopher Columbus 
for boldness both of thought and deed. 
His work stands alone forever. But every 
year's historical study makes it increasingly 



20 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

apparent that the discovery of America was 
the exploit of the age in which Columbus 
lived. Enough men were thinking about 
the road to the East by way of the West to 
beget an atmosphere of expectancy ; enough 
support could be found from men who be- 
lieved the enterprise at least worthy of a 
trial; enough of a spirit of adventure was 
abroad in western Europe to make sure of 
response to a call for explorers. Moreover, 
western Europe flatly demanded, and de- 
manded with growing vehemence, that every 
possibility of finding a route to the East be 
exhausted. 

So in the history of thinking about God 
it may almost be said that some periods 
in the world's Hfe have peremptorily de- 
manded that rehgious leaders find a larger 
conception of God. As an illustration con- 
sider the extent to which the doctrine of God 
has been adjusted to the evolutionary think- 
ing of the last fifty years. If we hark back 
to the idea of God's method of creation 
which obtained before Darwin published 
the Origin of Species, we see a conception 
totally at variance with the idea of Christian 
thinkers to-day. There can be no question 



INTRODUCTORY 21 

that the God of Christianity has been with 
measurable success fitted into the evolution- 
ary theories of our time, or, rather, the evo- 
lutionary theories have been adjusted to the 
Christian conception of God. This result 
has been achieved not by the superhuman 
efforts of this or that philosopher but by the 
determination of the general thinking of the 
last fifty years to have it so. To be sure, no 
important question affecting any moral ele- 
ment in our conception of God has been 
before us. The problem has been as to our 
view of the divine method. After what we 
call the "Christian consciousness" became 
convinced that no injury could be done the 
New Testament teaching of the love and 
hohness of God by the scientists' insistence 
upon the evolutionary method in creation, 
the popular demand for the interpretation 
of the divine activity in evolutionary terms 
became irresistible. There is a sense in 
which the quality and the supply of theo- 
logical speculation are determined by the 
popular demand. 

To say this in other language, we may 
reflect for a moment that there are styles in 
theological formulas as well as in houses or 



22 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

garments. Who sets the style of house of 
to-day, or of hats or coats of the present 
season? Somebody, somewhere, gives the 
initial impulse, but a style does not become a 
style until the public sets its approval upon 
and adopts the fashion. Similarly, ideas 
become the rage, as we may say, in the realm 
of philosophic and reHgious discussion. In 
deahng with a cut of garment people soon 
find that there are boundaries set in the 
nature of things within which the style must 
move. It would not do for the current 
fashion to call for too thin a coat in the 
winter. This only means, however, that 
there are hmits of good sense within which 
the pubUc mind will confine itself. It be- 
comes incumbent on anyone discussing our 
theme to ask if there are limitations within 
which pubhc thinking must remain as it con- 
siders the deeper problems of life and 
destiny. This problem will be the theme of 
the second part of this essay. 

We have been treating of the spheres in 
which pubhc opinion shapes thought by 
making a definite demand for this or that 
type of conception. There are other and 
less direct roads along which popular 



INTRODUCTORY 23 

opinion presses upon theology, the influ- 
ences being all the more effective from the 
fact that their presence and activity are 
often unsuspected. We speak of types of 
social atmosphere in which some beliefs 
come to birth and grow with prodigious 
vitality while other beliefs die out. We 
have in mind the set of circumstances in 
which we cannot say that public opinion 
definitely calls for one type of belief as over 
against another, but in which, nevertheless, 
the pubhc opinion is favorable to the devel- 
opment of ideas which seem to spring natur- 
ally and spontaneously out of the social soil 
of the time. 

Suppose we are dealing with a cycle 
in a nation's existence when the national 
tendencies are strongly bent toward im- 
periahsm. It would be too much to say 
that in such an era there is any popular de- 
mand for an embodiment of the doctrine of 
the church in imperiahstic terms. Nobody 
is asking that preachers or teachers phrase 
the preaching of the church in any such 
fashion as to lend force to the claim that the 
church is to adopt the terminology or the 
methods of political or military imperialism. 



24 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

Yet as a matter of almost obvious historic 
truth imperiahsm in the church is very apt 
to follow imperiahsm in commercial or 
pohtical development. We repeat that this 
is all the more probable because the ten- 
dency is so unconscious on the part of ec- 
clesiastical leaders. Many of the most de- 
voted churchmen may not be able to detect 
this parallehsm between the national and 
the ecclesiastical movement even after it has 
been pointed out. It might be noted, in 
passing, that this is the explanation of the 
intense resentment of some ecclesiastics 
when a keen-sighted prophet puts his finger 
on a dangerous tendency in the activity of 
an imperiahstically minded group of chm'ch 
leaders. Those who are rebuked because of 
their subser\dency to politics and finance are 
not conscious of their subserviency. They 
have breathed the social atmosphere of their 
era as unconsciously as they have breathed 
the physical air. 

Ideas are tied to one another by a bond 
of inherent kinship. If one idea dominates 
a given movement, a brood of similar and 
yet secondary ideas sweep up with it into 
power. We cannot go so far as the Hege- 



INTRODUCTORY «6 

lians and speak of history as unfolding with 
inevitable logic. It would be sheer dull- 
ness of sight, however, to fail to recognize 
that a regnant idea makes a path and a 
place for the ideas to which it is akin. A 
strong tendency toward a monarchical form 
of government carries with it almost ir- 
resistibly a notion of ecclesiastical rigidity 
which may become quite powerful. The 
propagandists for monarchy may protest 
that they have no interest in church ques- 
tions whatsoever. But the fact is that strict 
monarchy and strict priestly control keep 
step with one another in a comfortable 
touch-of -elbow. If we pull one idea up into 
prominence in the world's thinking, we, by 
the same effort, drag into importance all 
other ideas or half -ideas with which the con- 
trolling notion is interlaced. Or, to change 
the figure, if we select one idea for supreme 
honor, that idea's boon companions — some 
of them poor relations, but relations never- 
theless — clamor successfully for a share of 
the applause. 

We may go farther and say that pubhc 
opinion shows its power not only over the 
ideas for which it definitely calls and which 



26 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

it nourishes by making a social soil and 
climate friendly to them, but also by toler- 
ance toward conceptions of another sort. 
Toleration is one of the mighty achieve- 
ments of the pubHc mind, hmited and in- 
adequate as toleration may be. A cynic 
might avow that toleration is, like justice, 
everybody's second choice; that every man 
would prefer to have his own way made the 
way of every other man, but will consent to 
the other man's following his own way for 
the sake of like liberty himself. Cynicism 
apart, however, the positive insistence upon 
toleration means everything. There are 
some doctrines toward which the ordinary 
man probably would take a critical or a 
hostile attitude if he were compelled to ex- 
press an opinion concerning them when he 
first learns of them. But pubhc opinion has 
back of it now a tradition of toleration in 
religion: the average man knows that he 
must be acquiescent — except that he may 
speak his mind. The very fact that he can- 
not interfere with the belief by repressive 
act gives the behef its chance. Then, if the 
belief seems to be attractive to any consider- 
able number of people, the common man 



INTRODUCTORY «7 

who in himself reflects the common senti- 
ment looks upon the belief as having a title 
to respectable standing before the world, 
whether he agrees with it or not. 

Look for a moment at the spread of theo- 
ries of mental control of matter in this coun- 
try in the last half century. There can hardly 
have been any very widespread demand in 
popular thinking for such theories as those 
of present-day healing by mental force, etc., 
though it may be that to-day's emphasis on 
the omnipotence of mind is inevitable as a 
reaction from the crude materiahsm of the 
later '60s and early '70s. Surely the raw 
advocacy of materialism of the Tyndall type 
ought to call for a swing toward ideaHstic 
opposition. But the popular thinking has 
not taken much account either of extreme 
materialists or of extreme idealists. A 
system which at first statement appears to 
be directly opposed to the ordinary man's 
common-sense view of things was dissem- 
inated in a land of tolerance until it had won 
a goodly number of devoted adherents and 
had accumulated to its credit a measurable 
degree of success in establishing its claims 
as to the superiority of mind over matter. 



28 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

In a less tolerant age the system could 
hardly have got a start. So that, while we 
cannot say such theories have the direct 
sanction of the popular opinion of our time, 
we must admit that they thrive upon a popu- 
lar acquiescence which, while possibly not 
approving the doctrines, would resent any 
attempt at persecution or at throwing them 
out of court. The general popular will is 
in all such matters the determining element. 
Judging by the utterances of the more 
acute historical observers of the processes of 
political government, it is permissible even 
to ask if every government which has ever 
existed — even the Oriental despotism — has 
not rested at last analysis upon the consent 
of the governed. Probably the most iron- 
willed autocrat ruhng over the most submis- 
sive subjects has known that there has been 
a Hmit to his despotism beyond which he 
must not pass. As people become more 
enlightened that hmit to oppression is more 
quickly reached, and even the despotism it- 
self is sooner or later done away. This is 
why agitators in all ages have so often pro- 
claimed to the masses of the people that they 
are responsible for their own hardships. 



INTRODUCTORY 29 

Such agitators always will have it that 
acquiescence is really a passive vote for the 
thing in which the pubhc mind acquiesces — 
though this is hardly just in theology. If 
our illustrations suggest that in toleration 
pubhc sentiment gives speculations of dubi- 
ous worth their golden opportunity, the 
reply must be forthcoming that toleration 
means the keeping open of the fair field for 
the play of the survival of the fittest. Pubhc 
opinion keeps open this field at least to a 
degree that allows what the soldiers called 
some "nice fighting" always to be going on. 
It is the object of this essay frankly to 
recognize the scope of popular authority in 
forging rehgious thinking. There is no 
evading the influence of pubhc opinion over 
our ideas of the kingdom of God. Now, the 
recognition of the existence of a force is the 
first step toward keeping that force imder 
proper control. We have not thought it 
necessary to say much about the obvious but 
most important fact that the sentiment of 
our own time lays more and more stress upon 
the right of the people themselves to increas- 
ing self-government. Politically, the battle 
has been fought through — at least in Occi- 



80 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

dental civilization — so that the people can 
pohtically control themselves. And a more 
consequential warfare than that for pohtical 
freedom is being fought out before our very- 
eyes: the people are insisting upon economic 
freedom. In every stage of society those 
who hold the keys of economic power have 
stupendous control over the exercise of 
every other kind of power. The multitudes 
themselves are reahzing this more and more. 
Hence the insistence upon broadening the 
base of control in modern industry. 

All this progressive conquest of independ- 
ence means a sturdier approach to the prob- 
lems of theology. There are some sound 
demands on the part of popular thinking to 
which the defenders of divine sovereignty 
will, if they are wise, give heed. In the ad- 
vance toward larger freedom the hosts of 
mankind have made discoveries as to the 
worth of himian hfe itself, and as to the 
proper attitudes toward human life in all 
its phases, which must indubitably have the 
most powerful bearing on theological think- 
ing. We wish to indicate the value of some 
of these sohder gains for religious theory. 
After having done this it will be in order 



INTRODUCTORY 31 

for us to indicate some of the limits which 
popular authority will have to observe in its 
attitude toward the problems of divine 
sovereignty. Or we may be allowed in these 
earher chapters to think of those weightier 
moral and spiritual ideals for which popular 
authority can be expected to give its sanc- 
tion in the long run, leaving to the later 
chapters a discussion of the factors which 
must protect these same ideals from those 
superficiaHties and excesses which some- 
times mark the action of popular opinion in 
the short run — if the expression is per- 
missible. Believing as we do that in the 
long run pubhc opinion will settle practic- 
ally everything in theology, we may, never- 
theless, find that in the short run public 
opinion at times is to be strenuously resisted. 
But this is anticipating. 



CHAPTER II 
THE DIVINE RESPONSIBILITY 

In the light of the truths discovered as 
men have moved toward nobler freedom 
what can popular authority rightly demand 
of a sovereign God? The theologians have 
from the beginning proclaimed the power of 
God. What limitations can we insist upon 
placing upon this power to make the idea of 
a sovereign God acceptable to present-day 
thought? 

The inescapable requisite is that in work- 
ing out our theories of God we represent him 
in terms of moral responsibihty. If a ruler 
is to have power, he must exercise that 
power under a sense of responsibility. Now, 
the old doctrines of arbitrary sovereignty 
for God are out of the question. Social 
criticism is here entirely just: if God is to 
claim the loving self-surrender of men's 
wills, he can base his claims only on the 
ground that his mighty powers are used 
under a bond of responsibility. 

32 



DIVINE RESPONSIBILITY 33 

We can well enough understand how the 
doctrine of an arbitrary divine sovereignty- 
got its start. There have been times when 
beneficial social consequences followed the 
preaching of a doctrine of the most arbitrary 
sovereignty. In a social system falling to 
pieces through ruthless and lawless an- 
archy it might be the duty of the prophet 
of God to call for absolute obedience to 
an autocratic God just for the sake of 
getting things into order. But after things 
have come into order we quickly resent 
the idea of an arbitrary control over us, 
even if that control is exercised from the 
throne of the universe. Men will not be 
good for long because any sort of divine 
Being autocratically commands them to be 
good. The natural and fitting answer to 
such an edict from a ruler is the question, 
How good are you? Looking back over 
the history of the church, it is not, indeed, 
difficult to see how the doctrine of an arbi- 
trary divine sovereignty got a start, but it is 
not easy to see how the learned doctors ever 
foimd a justification for their doctrine in the 
Scripture, for the Scriptures from the be- 
ginning to the end represent God as labor- 



34 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

ing under a consciousness of responsibility. 
Even if we follow the biblical students who 
insist that in the earliest times Yahweh was 
nothing but Israel's tribal God, and chiefly a 
God of battles at that, we must remember 
that we cannot dismiss a fighting God until 
we know what he is fighting for. From the 
earhest scriptural writers comes the teach- 
ing that God was fighting for Israel, and for 
the moral aims toward which Israel so soon 
began to advance. From this beginning on 
through the era of the prophets who unerr- 
ingly discerned the moral might of a God 
who was doing his utmost to discharge his 
moral obhgations toward his people, we 
have very httle suggestion of anything 
capricious or self-willed in the exercise of 
divine power. Even the passages which 
speak of Israel's God as jealous connect the 
jealousy with a passion for the welfare of 
men. We might obey an arbitrary divine 
sovereignty just as the best road out of a 
bad plight. We might conceivably make 
terms with an arbitrary universe, for 
the sake of getting on more comfortably, 
but we could never hope to win the ap- 
proval of a moral community by any such 



DIVINE RESPONSIBILITY 35 

acquiescence. The only correct moral atti- 
tude before such despotism is the atti- 
tude of protest. If we must have a merely 
arbitrary divinity, then let us recognize at 
the outset that any man holding power and 
using it under a consciousness of moral re- 
sponsibility is superior to an arbitrary God. 
The modern popular doctrine is, and this 
doctrine is among the soundest moral find- 
ings of the race, that the possession of power 
of any sort over one's fellows puts the 
possessor of the power under heavy bonds. 
These bonds must be thought of as heavier 
for God than for any other ruler with power. 
It is interesting to glance at some of the 
expedients by which men have tried to evade 
the problem of moral responsibility pre- 
sented by God's sovereignty. It is not far 
from the mark to assume that popular 
speculation conceives of God in deistic 
terms. God made the world and started it 
running. Once made, it speeds along under 
its own momentum. The terrible catas- 
trophes that occur as the world rolls on 
hardly were foreseen by the Creator. Of 
course the holder of the popular deistic view 
never puts it just this way. He speaks of 



36 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

consequences as the inevitable working out 
of natural law, as if law went by itself. 
Now, there is no rehef for the Ruler of the 
universe in any such looseness as this. If 
he made the world, he made the grooves in 
which it rolls along, and he made all the 
lives that get caught and crushed. The 
fields of northern France are this day 
sown with unexploded grenades and shells 
and bombs. Suppose a child fifty years from 
now trips over a loaded shell in such 
fashion as to explode the shell and blow 
his own body to pieces, who is to blame? 
The nation who fifty years before caused 
the war that fired the shell is to blame. 
Merely removing the agent in time from the 
consequences of his deed does not touch the 
question of moral responsibihty. There is, 
indeed, a rough sort of rehef for the im- 
agination in deistic thinking or half -think- 
ing; but deism, if anything, makes the 
problem of God's responsibihty worse, for 
it suggests an unwilhngness on the part of 
the Creator to keep close to the exploding 
consequences of his own deed. 

In more recent days there has been an 
obvious trend in pubhc thinking away from 



DIVINE RESPONSIBILITY 37 

a crude deism to an emphasis on divine im- 
manence. In commoner phrasings this doc- 
trine has sought to meet the problems of the 
divine responsibihty by putting God im- 
mediately into all things. Things must be 
at bottom good or he would not be in them. 
This is essentially an attitude of faith in the 
moral God of the New Testament, and as 
such is substantially Christian. When the 
behever, however, attempts to buttress his 
faith in the immanent God with argument 
he does not get far, for immanence brings 
the mysterious God very close to us. Prac- 
tically, the doctrine of divine immanence is 
often used to help us look away from the 
dark facts. The holder of the view picks 
out the beautiful or beneficial aspects of the 
universe and says that God is in these. This 
is worse than nothing for steady thinking. 
The utmost that the doctrine of divine im- 
manence can do is to dehver us from the 
terror of a self -running machine, and make 
us feel that we are immediately in contact 
with a God who is in all things. But the 
further question arises as to what he is in 
the things for. 

The doctrine of immanence has a chronic 



38 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

tendency to slide over into a doctrine of 
pantheism. Modern science has made us 
f amihar with the notion of one great Energy- 
moving in and through alL The vast doc- 
trines of ideahsm of the middle of the nine- 
teenth century made us acquainted with 
immense ideas of whose unfolding the uni- 
verse is the manifestation. But whether 
the universe be the expression of Energy or 
the development of Idea, both the scientific 
and philosophic speculations are pantheistic 
if they leave no room for the play of the free 
spirit. With the free spirit ruled out the 
problem of responsibihty is canceled alto- 
gether, for if God himself is not free, there 
is no reason for talking about his responsi- 
bihty. If he is free and men are not, why 
should he have created a race of human 
puppets? On a pantheistic scheme what we 
think of as good and bad are ahke products 
of the same force or the same idea. If we 
are dwellers in a pantheistic universe, the 
best we can do is to try to put up with it ; but 
the impulses to put up or not to put up, the 
feelings of acquiescence or the feehngs of 
protest, what seems to us to be sense, and 
what seems to be nonsense, all ahke have the 



DIVINE RESPONSIBILITY 39 

same high or low origin. Curiously enough, 
the doctrine of pantheism has seemed to 
some to lend support to the modern empha- 
sis on the value of men as masses or as mem- 
bers of an all-inclusive social organism. 
Here again the resort is to imagination 
rather than to thought. The divine spirit is 
conceived of as some vast nimbus or atmos- 
phere inclosing all men alike: and this ex- 
pansive spatial figure seems to be a help in 
thinking of the stirrings of the multitudes 
for whom men are hoping to find a door to 
worthier dignity. The doctrine that men 
are all ahke the manifestations of an under- 
lying force is rather a precarious support 
for emphasis on the worth of all mankind if 
the play of the free human spirit is done 
away with. 

Some of a group of yoimger philosophers 
have recently avowed that the social heroes 
of the world need the type of courage which 
consists of wilhngness to face with open and 
steady eyes the facts of a desperate cosmic 
situation. They look out upon the universe 
and see no escape from the clutch of the 
awfully destructive forces which march 
smashing on. The universe began in star- 



40 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

dust and will probably end in cinders. Man 
appears at one stage in the evolution to 
flutter through his httle life and then to fade 
away. Philosophically, this may be out- 
right materialism. It is materialism in the 
sense that the adherents of the theory de- 
clare that all talk of holding the universe re- 
sponsible for anything is nonsense. It is 
not materiahsm, however, of the sort that 
lays stress on material motives in the human 
breast. Many who profess this view give 
themselves to the highest forms of social en- 
deavor. They declare that the glory of man 
is just his power to gaze steadily at the uni- 
verse in all its awfulness. 

Bertrand Russell, for one, avows that 
there is a stark dehght in looking out 
upon things just as they are. Mr. Rus- 
sell himself is one of the most unselfish 
social leaders of our time: but if the imi- 
verse is as bare as his speculations would 
have it, his dehght in contemplation must 
be very stark indeed. In the universe it- 
self there is no ray of help anywhere, ac- 
cording to these teachers, but men neverthe- 
less must struggle on to free their creative 
impulses and to work under the law of un- 



DIVINE RESPONSIBILITY 41 

selfish social service. It is fairly difficult to 
make out just how such stalwarts combine 
their philosophy and their practice. They 
are altogether splendid in their devotion to 
the cause of human uphft. No trace of 
their theoretical despair seems to have 
worked out into practical result, for they 
perform a valued service in holding the 
torch of ideaHsm on high. But they say so 
much about being wilhng to plunge forward 
into the dark that one cannot help suspect- 
ing that they would be bitterly disappointed 
if they found at the end that they were really 
in the hght. In other words, one cannot 
restrain a suspicion that some of these later 
philosophers are bound at any cost to have a 
black universe. The universe is dark enough 
at the best without this gritty refusal to con- 
template any grounds for larger hope. 
Moreover, we are convinced that the masses 
of mankind do not care to have their dehght 
quite so stark. On the whole, if a cosmic 
view is to help mankind on and up, it must 
tend to cheerfulness. 

It is curious to note too how unwilUng 
some of these social philosophers are to 
judge the validity of a philosophic belief 



42 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

by its social effects. Some of them seem 
to be very strenuous in their antipathy to 
anything philosophically or theologically 
pragmatic. Mr. Harold J. Laski, to take 
a single illustration, is one of the ablest 
of the younger group of social theorizers. 
He seems to be doing as much as anyone 
in our day to clear the ground for a new 
doctrine of authority in social groups which 
will make easier the progress toward more 
vital sovereignty. Yet anyone who has fol- 
lowed Mr. Laski's book reviews in the New 
Repubhc will recall how he combines with 
an open-mindedness toward theological con- 
structions a quick hostihty toward anything 
savoring of pragmatism in back-lying re- 
ligious theory. For example, he once re- 
ferred to John Henry Newman's Grammar 
of Assent as a charter not of faith but of 
skepticism. We have no reason to beheve 
that Mr. Laski's foundation philosophy is as 
stark as Mr. Russell's. But these newer 
leaders do seem to rule out the social conse- 
quences of a philosophic theory as a test of 
the validity of the theory. We do not hap- 
pen at present to be considering theological 
beliefs in the light of their formal logical 



DIVINE RESPONSIBILITY 43 

validity. We are instead considering the 
problem of a form of dynamics in popular 
thinking. And we must avow our convic- 
tion that a popular thought which tends 
more and more toward insistence upon re- 
sponsibility in the use of power will not 
long acquiesce in the theory of an irrespon- 
sible universe. 

Since WiUiam James came into promi- 
nence as a prophet of philosophy the tight 
self-sufficiency of an absolute pantheism has 
been somewhat broken up. There has been 
a fresh emphasis on pluraHsm especially as 
regards human souls — abundant stress on 
the value of the human hf e — some pluralists 
going so far as to teach that the individual 
lives have existed from all eternity. Attrac- 
tive as this theory is in some of its phases, it 
does not aid us much in reflecting about 
divine responsibihty. Life is hard enough 
as it is without brooding over ourselves as 
existences carrying over from some previous 
world and yet with the thread of self -con- 
tinuous memory cut altogether. Moreover, 
the system sins against the popular demand 
for unity. It is a mistake to fancy that the 
demand for a universe, or a unified system, 



44 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

is just the creature of the brains of abso- 
lutist philosophers. There is nothing more 
common in the commonest of common men 
than the impulse toward some basis of 
theoretical unity. The breaking up of the 
universe into practically self-existent and 
measurably independent selves who always 
have been what they are on their own ac- 
count, and always will be the ultimate facts, 
will hardly suffice. 

Somewhat akin to pluralism is the doc- 
trine of the hmited God. A group of writ- 
ers hke Mr. H. G. Wells solve the problem 
of the responsibility of God by making him 
not responsible. God is not infinite but 
finite. He is caught, hke ourselves, in the 
meshes and tangles of things and is fighting 
his way out. Unity in the universe is not 
something given, but something to be won 
by conflict, and the invisible God is fighting 
on and up, calling upon us for the very real 
help which we can render him. The objec- 
tions to this view come out of that passion for 
unity of which we have spoken above. At 
one stroke the universe is severed into two 
warring camps — the forces that are for God, 
and those that are against him. But what is 



DIVINE RESPONSIBILITY 45 

the plain on which they meet? Do they 
meet in space? Is space independent of 
either or both of them? What is space, the 
expression of a material or of personal real- 
ity? Of course it is dreadful in these days 
to raise any distinctly metaphysical ques- 
tions, and the professional philosophers, as 
far as they can, keep away from meta- 
physics. But the common man has a child- 
like fondness for asking metaphysical ques- 
tions, and his questions cannot be dismissed 
with gestures of impatience, for in some 
childhkeness there is much wisdom. 

This doctrine of a limited God, however, 
is not so revolutionary as it seems. Chris- 
tianity itself holds to a limited God, but the 
limitations are thought of as assumed by 
God himself. The view of Mr. Wells is 
significant and important as a reaction from 
the absolutism in theology which prevailed 
during the latter half of the nineteenth 
century. This emphasis was carried to such 
extremes that much theological exposition 
virtually proceeded on the assumption that 
omnipotence, omnipresence, and omnis- 
cience in the Deity are as important as hoh- 
ness and love. Some theologians even 



46 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

taught an absolutism so strict as to raise 
serious questions as to the possibihty of the 
Infinite's coming into touch with the finite 
at all. Still, it will not do to make the 
obstacles against which God contends some- 
thing given him from without. We must 
make provision for some sort of Unity if we 
are to have a universe. 

There must be limitations for the Divine 
Force in the very fact of creation itself. If 
God is to act in one way, that means that 
he must not act in the ways contrary to that 
way. If the universe is to be consistent, 
God must adopt some courses to which he 
confines himself. If the universe is to be an 
expression of sanity at all, it must have some 
kind of coherence and consecutiveness. If 
a universe is to be of one sort, it cannot be 
of another sort — and it certainly cannot be 
of all the opposed sorts. 

We must be careful, however, not to im- 
agine that in holding to the hmitation of 
God we have found an explanation of 
physical evil and pain. It does not require 
much imagination to picture a finite uni- 
verse to whose workings God himself is 
limited that would be much less dreadful 



DIVINE RESPONSIBILITY 47 

than the present system. Take the single 
enigma of animal suffering, or the sufferings 
of men before they have come to anything 
like power to reflect upon their sufferings 
and adjust themselves to them. Granting all 
that the philosophers have said about the 
usefulness of pain, the fact seems to be that 
there is more pain than we have any need 
for. We stand here in the presence of an 
insoluble mystery. All that we can say is 
that we do not have the data for even a good 
guess. Our solutions are much more satis- 
factory when we are deahng with the pains 
of other people than with our own. All the 
philosophizing since the beginning has been 
futile so far as any adequate explanation of 
pain is concerned. Our philosophizings 
may help to distract our minds for the in- 
stant from the ache of pain, but at the last 
the attempted explanations of the physical 
distress of the world must be looked upon as 
additions to the distress itself. It is well for 
us to remember that we have this problem on 
any theory. It cannot be explained away. 
Now, popular thinking does not take it as 
too great a hardship when we cannot explain 
everything. Great nations at time of crisis 



48 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

will elect leaders to rulership, delegating 
them authority over possessions and lives 
without asking at the outset for explana- 
tions as to why pohcies are carried through 
by one method rather than by another. A 
day of reckoning must, of course, dawn for 
all such rulers, but the people plod forward 
toward that day of reckoning in confidence 
that trusted rulers can give satisfactory ex- 
planation of the governmental decisions 
when the proper moment arrives for full 
publicity. So it is in the relations of the 
mass of behevers to the ruler over the uni- 
verse. Only the hardiest intelHgences would 
fancy that they are now in a position to 
understand the reasons for the processes of 
the world even if the reasons were to be put 
into explanatory statement before them. 
The attitude of the typical Christian is that 
of honestly recognizing the terrible features 
of the present order, and yet of waiting for 
explanation in confidence that the holder 
of power is using that power under a sense 
of responsibihty. The true behever may be 
the first to admit that the Ruler of the uni- 
verse has not told us all, or has even told us 
much. But he beheves that we know enough 



DIVINE RESPONSIBILITY 49 

to have confidence as we wait for the fuUer 
reveahngs. Meanwhile he recognizes the 
total inadequacy of any and all explanations 
of the hard features of the cosmic order in 
which men hve. 

The most serious hmitation which we can 
imagine a responsible ruler as taking upon 
himself is the hmitation imphed in human 
freedom. The only ground on which to 
justify the crea'don of free human hves is a 
final lofty moral outcome in such lives them- 
selves. Probably most of us would admit 
that a racial organism of disciphned free 
wills, working together in the pursuit of the 
good and true and beautiful, would be an 
end worth the utmost effort of any di\4ne 
being. No amount of physical cost would 
be too great to pay for such an outcome. 
The expounders of the doctrine of the Chris- 
tian God have to make clear to mankind that 
we must think of God as striving toward 
such an outcome under a hea\y weight of 
responsibihty if we are to fit the doctrine to 
the demands of modern times. We pass to 
consider some forms in which this emphasis 
on the responsibihty of God is hkely to make 
its demands. 



CHAPTER III 

RESPONSIBLE TO WHOM? 

We have said that popular opinion will 
never be long satisfied with the idea of an 
irresponsible God. But to whom is God re- 
sponsible? We repeat that we are search- 
ing for an ideal of the Divine which will 
measurably meet the long-run popular de- 
mand. It is no conclusive argument against 
our ideal to protest that the facts as we see 
them in actual experience do not bear out 
the conception of God which we are erecting 
as an ideal. We already have seen that 
men, even in masses, are willing to suspend 
judgment on the poHcies of a ruler if they 
can trust that ruler, even though the facts 
at a given date might not seem to lend them- 
selves to a favorable verdict. In the pre- 
ceding chapter we have tried to show that 
there is absolutely no imderstanding the 
hard details of the present order on the basis 
of any interpretative data which we now 
have. Men hold persistently, however, to 

50 



RESPONSIBLE TO WHOM? 51 

their trust that the present order is not all. 
And in the face of a cruel system they build 
for themselves an ideal of God which they 
feel will one day be justified by the Hght of 
full knowledge. 

First of all, it is impossible to see how we 
can escape from the conclusion that God is 
responsible to the men whom he has created. 
This responsibihty arises out of the fact that 
in the nature of the case men cannot be con- 
sulted about their being created before they 
are created. No one of us is asked as to 
whether he is wiUing to come into existence, 
or whether he is wilhng to hve in a world 
like ours. Life may, in itself, be the sweet- 
est of boons, but it is conferred upon us 
without our asking. Moreover, though 
men cling desperately to Hfe, there is a good 
deal of question as to how much of a boon 
it actually is with the majority of men upon 
the face of the earth at a given moment. 
Probably if we were to learn the truth as to 
what is in the consciousness of the vast ma- 
jority of men on earth at any instant, we 
would discover that the predominant ele- 
ment is physical hunger. We must repeat 
that the production of a race of men freely 



52 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

choosing the pursuit of the good, the true 
and the beautiful, and making the most of 
themselves in that pursuit, is an aim that 
would justify the creation of such a race. 
We need have no illusions, however, as to 
the restrictions upon the freedom in which 
the actual man finds himself. None of us 
had any voice on some most important ques- 
tions as to his own lot in hfe. We had no 
choice in choosing the place or the time of 
oiw birth or the racial or material circum- 
stances into which we were to come. So far 
as the present order is concerned we are all 
drafted into that order. This puts upon the 
Drafter a responsibihty which, from the 
human point of view, is httle short of 
staggering. We must never lose sight of 
the creature's responsibihty to the Creator. 
It would be just as mistaken to lose sight of 
the Creator's responsibihty to the creature. 
The obhgations of creatorship are so 
enormous that we can hardly find any an- 
alogy which will give us even a hint of their 
weight and expense. It is a commonplace 
that a heavy responsibihty rests upon a mih- 
tary leader ordering men to their death. 
We can well beheve the conscientious gen- 



RESPONSIBLE TO WHOM? 63 

eral when he declares that he would gladly 
exchange places with the humblest private 
in the ranks, to be ordered to certain de- 
struction by the enemy's machine guns, 
rather than bear the heaviness of the reahza- 
tion that his mistake of information or judg- 
ment may cause the futile loss of hundreds 
and thousands of young hves. The re- 
sponsibihty of ordering men to die, however, 
is not a feather's weight compared to the re- 
sponsibility of ordering men to live. The 
only possible justification for bringing men 
into existence must be the Creator's resolu- 
tion and power to help them to the utmost 
in the exercise of their freedom without too 
much limiting that freedom itself. And 
modern society is insisting more and more 
that freedom shall not be construed with the 
old-time meaning of absence of hindrance 
or constraint. We used to hear that free- 
dom means the removal of the obstacle in the 
path of the free man. Surely, freedom has 
this meaning; but we cannot rest with so 
small a content. The free man is he who 
has most fully realized the possibiUties 
within himself. If he is to realize these pos- 
sibilities freely, he must be persuaded freely 



54 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

to realize them, and must find positive help 
at hand in this quest of the good. 

Now, just to see how appaUingly com- 
plex is this theme of the responsibihty of the 
divine for the human let us look at some of 
the boundaries within which the divine help 
must confine itself. There must be no hint 
of compelUng men to love the good, the true, 
and the beautiful. In the crude sense, of 
course, this would be out of the question. 
But it might be possible for the Creator so 
to play upon the creatures as by a process of 
subtle, inner determinism to make them au- 
tomatically love the good without their 
reahzing that they had lost their freedom. 
The modern physiological psychologist 
would have us beheve that inner states are 
the accompaniment of outer physical con- 
ditions. Without subscribing at all to a 
materialistic creed we may well admit that 
improvement in one's nervous system, for 
example, leads to better and fuller mental 
and moral health. It is theoretically ad- 
missible that the force which is back of all 
things might so effectively play upon the 
human organism as to make the organism 
the accompaniment of better and fuller 



RESPONSIBLE TO WHOM? 55 

ideas. In short, if we take seriously some 
modern psychologists, we may possibly 
fancy that by a process of physical training 
and evolution we may produce a race of 
beings so physically sound that their ideas 
may all be sound also. If we had such a 
race, the individuals might be very delight- 
ful to contemplate, but they would not be 
free beings in the sense that we have in mind 
when we speak of a free moral creature as 
justifying all the cost of creation. We may 
all well pray that we may learn more and 
more to make use of conditions of physical 
and nervous health for moral and spiritual 
well-being; but even so, we must insist that 
it requires the regal power of a free person 
to make the most of such soundness of 
health. 

If we are to have a race of free indi- 
viduals, we must insist upon the responsi- 
bihty of the Creator so to deal with them as 
not to leave them less because of his deahng 
with them, but, rather, to make them more 
and better through his touch upon them. On 
the one hand we must have divine help for 
the human, and on the other hand that help 
must not be so lavish as to pauperize the 



66 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

human. It requires but little familiarity 
with conventional Christian prayer to recog- 
nize how completely the direct answer to 
much of such prayer would do away with 
any free self-reahzation on the part of the 
petitioner. It is a commonplace of current 
social theory that men must by some real 
effort earn what they get. Any theory of 
prayer which would do away with the need 
of the full activity of the will of the free 
person would soon nulhfy freedom con- 
ceived of as positive and abundant life. The 
most serious objection to the notion of God 
as an amiable and well-wishing Lover of 
men is that such good-natured amiabihty 
probably would develop a race of human 
weaklings. The development of a race of 
free men must be a dehcate task for the 
Creator. It implies a balance between giv- 
ing and withholding before which the mind 
sinks back exhausted. 

To put it all in other terms, a God truly 
set upon doing the most for free men must 
needs have profound respect for the choices 
of those free men. In an earher age of 
theology rehgious freedom was presented 
about thus: the Almighty was represented 



RESPONSIBLE TO WHOM? 57 

as saying to men: ''Here is the way of life. 
You can walk in it or not, just as you please, 
but if you don't walk in it you will be 
damned outright." There is something 
refreshingly bracing in this view, but it is a 
meager and inadequate statement of human 
freedom. It usually meant that God was to 
have his own way anyhow and that men 
could either follow his plan wiUingly or be 
dragged along, even their danmation show- 
ing forth the glory of God. The essential 
problem of freedom, however, may begin 
after a man has chosen to walk in the path 
of hfe. The choices in that way are not 
always between higher and lower. They 
may be on the same plane, and yet lead to 
a wide difference in final outcome. What- 
ever the choices, they must not be compelled 
and they must be respected. We sometimes 
hear men exhorted to find God's way and 
follow that. It might be nearer the truth 
to say that in some choices God has no way. 
He waits for men to choose and then adjusts 
himself to the outcome. With all our stress 
on the primacy of God's will we must not so 
emphasize that primacy as to make the will 
of man of none effect. The will of man 



58 PXJBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

must in some degree count as an active and 
effective agent in the system of things. If 
it be urged against all this that freedom 
might damage the universe, the reply is that 
such risk is part of the responsibility which 
a Creator must assume in making free men. 
If we are to believe in a free God who out 
of his own free and yet responsible free- 
dom has created free men, we must look 
upon that God as respecting the free choices 
of men, and yet as working through the out- 
come of those free choices to justify his 
creation in the end. 

If the Almighty were dealing with one 
single human soul, the task would be diffi- 
cult enough, but the entire question of free- 
dom becomes vastly more complicated when 
we remember that the Creator is the author 
of the hves of millions upon millions. The 
usual definition of freedom has turned 
round the idea that the individual is free as 
long as his liberty does not interfere with the 
hberty of some one else. Just as the defini- 
tion of hberty as freedom from external 
constraint has been found inadequate, so we 
must also point out the inadequacy of the 
definition of freedom as the liberty to de- 



RESPONSIBLE TO WHOM? 59 

velop oneself within the hmits set by the 
good of others. Underneath this definition 
is the old implication of individuals as set in 
almost artificial separateness one from an- 
other, the individual being a unit on his own 
account who presumably could continue to 
exist if there were no other individuals in 
existence besides himself. The conception 
of freedom has to be so modified as to make 
the interrelations of men a positive power in 
bringing the individuals to their own largest 
development. Under the influence of the 
older idea debaters about freedom seemed to 
think that the individual was consciously to 
take his own development as an end in itself, 
within the hmits set by the development of 
other individuals. There is about this idea 
something almost suggestive of a sort of 
competition in free self-reaHzation in the 
exercise of freedom. A more satisfactory 
notion seems to be that the individual is 
freely to throw himself into the hfe of the 
whole body of mankind, and that the actions 
and reactions back and forth are to carry 
the progress of the individual to the highest 
possible pitch. 

We need a new mode of saying that the 



60 PXJBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

Creator is responsible to the whole organ- 
ism of mankind which he has created. We 
are well aware that a logical fallacy lies in 
wait for the upholder of the doctrine that 
society as such is an organism in itself. The 
only substances in society are the indi- 
viduals. The only seat of consciousness in 
the body of the race is the consciousness in 
the minds of the individuals. But, on the 
other hand, these individual consciousnesses 
come to fullest development only in the play 
and interplay of reciprocal impact upon one 
another. Again, the various minds in inter- 
action develop states of inner consciousness 
to which they might never arrive as isolated 
units. Once more, the more distinctive a 
consciousness becomes in itself the more 
valuable it seems to be for the entire hfe of 
mankind; so that the thought of society as 
an organism is more than a mere figure of 
speech. Society is not an organism in that 
it, of itself, is a distinct spiritual entity with 
organic members to correspond, but it is an 
organism in that individuals come to their 
fullest life only as they work together so 
closely that each ceases to think of himself. 
The man who seeks his own freedom alone 



RESPONSIBLE TO WHOM? 61 

loses it. And the man who freely throws 
himself open to the majestic currents of 
hmnan life finds his freedom. Paradoxical 
as it may sound, the mind which is most 
deeply submerged in the currents of the 
broader human Kfe becomes in a profoimd 
sense the most original mind. 

God is responsible, then, for the good of 
the whole. But the responsibility must not 
be interpreted as satisfying itself merely in 
adjusting a host of individuals to one an- 
other, or in keeping them out of one an- 
other's way. Mark Twain used to satirize 
Christianity by a story of the prayers of a 
cabinful of Christians in a saihng ship cross- 
ing an ocean against the trade winds. The 
humorist declared that these voyaging 
Christians would pray for fair winds for 
themselves at a season when an answer to 
their prayer would mean head winds to 
ninety-nine of every hundred of the sailors 
on the sea. The jest was thought to hit off 
most happily a prevalent Christian mood; 
and the humorist imphed at least that God, 
if there is a God at all, must give his atten- 
tion to the ninety-nine per cent of the sailors 
on hfe's sea without regard even to the ut- 



62 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

most fervency of the one per cent who might 
wish the trade winds reversed. The criti- 
cism does have its measure of pertinence. 
The obhgation of a rational Creator is to the 
entire social organism which he has brought 
into existence. But the criticism rests upon 
the fundamental fallacy of a miscellaneous 
lot of separate ships going their own ways 
over a sea of life. The more adequate figure 
of speech would be of a fleet under a unified 
command, or of an ocean leviathan saihng 
indeed a terrible sea, with the fate of each 
of the sailors bound up in the welfare of all 
the others, and with the ultimate arrival at 
port dependent upon the thoroughness with 
which the sailors could act together in obedi- 
ence to one captain. From this point of 
view the divine responsibihty is more than 
that of a Cosmic Traffic Pohceman keeping 
lives from bumping one another out of their 
courses. It is, rather, that of placing each 
hfe where it will count for the most for the 
good of the whole, and of so making the 
whole bear upon the individual that the tides 
of hfe from all can help each on to his larg- 
est and best self. 

Furthermore and finally, we must avow 



RESPONSIBLE TO WHOM? 63 

God's responsibilities to himself. If we 
may be allowed to speak in very anthro- 
pomorphic fashion, we may say that God 
must be true to the ideals of his own hf e. It 
is to be assumed that a Rational Being of 
whose purpose the world is the utterance 
must have determined upon one cosmic 
system rather than upon another among 
many because that system is best, every- 
thing considered. If the laws of nature, for 
example, are the rules according to which 
the divine will works, it would be absurd to 
expect those rules to be lightly set aside. 
What we could expect would be that free 
men, proving more and more responsible in 
the use of their freedom, could be granted 
larger and larger use of and control over the 
laws. Human freedom must not be so con- 
strued as to make possible easy variation 
from the fundamental regularities on which 
a universe must depend. If we are to have 
a universe at all — ^that is to say, one system 
turning round a central ideal or plan — the 
condition of the existence of such a universe 
must be some sort of consistency in its oper- 
ations. Granting that the welfare of a 
single human soul is of more moral conse- 



64 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

quence than all the physical forces in the 
universe looked at merely as physical forces, 
we must nevertheless insist that the problem 
takes on a different color when these forces 
are regarded as the expression of thought 
and plan. Whatever laws express the deep- 
est wisdom of the Almighty must be re- 
garded as too important to be easily waived. 
The Almighty is responsible for the ful- 
fillment of his own aims. It is permissible 
in the proper context to speak of the 
Almighty as if he had ventured on a tre- 
mendous experiment in the creation of free 
men. We do not pretend to any satisfac- 
tory metaphysical understanding here, but 
we must be careful not to yield too much to 
the idea of a God who would plunge into an 
unwarranted hazard. A physical universe 
itself which would at last mirror the wisdom 
of the Creator would be an end worth while. 
A race of free human beings finally serving 
the good, the true, and the beautiful of their 
own free choice would be still more worth 
while; in fact, such an end would of itself 
be beyond all others glorious. But before a 
responsible God can venture upon the crea- 
tion of a free race he must have within him- 



RESPONSIBLE TO WHOM? 65 

self enough resources, not of compulsion but 
of spiritual persuasion, to be sure that he 
can win the masses of mankind to his own 
ideal. We have not the shghtest desire to 
enter into any such vexed realms of debate 
as that concerning the eternal loss of souls. 
But if the proportion of such loss in the uni- 
verse is to be manifestly too great, or if there 
is to be any loss before the resources of 
divine persuasiveness have been exhausted, 
such loss would argue irresponsibihty in the 
Creator. 

The theologian would say that the 
Creator is responsible to the demands not of 
his own ideal but of his own nature. With- 
out here entering into theological discussion 
as to the nature of Christ we may say that 
popular thought seems more and more to be 
tending to the conviction that God is hke 
unto Christ. We may say, then, that a re- 
sponsible God must be responsible to the 
Christ in himself. We say of a man that he 
must be responsible to the truest and best in 
himself. While it is hardly permissible to 
say that there is any better or best in God, 
we may say that we believe that the revela- 
tion of the Christ is the revelation of the 



66 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

final truth of God, and that popular thought 
of the divine responsibihty is not likely to 
stop short of the doctrine that our behef in 
God rests upon our confidence that he acts 
out of responsibility to the Christliness of his 
own nature. We shall speak of this more at 
length in a later chapter. 



CHAPTER IV 

GOD AND MAN AND THE DAILY 
TASK 

A FURTHER note in modern popular 
thinking is that the God of the universe is a 
God of work. He is not conceived of as an 
idler enjoying the activities of the beings 
whom he has created. This requires no com- 
ment. On the other hand, he must not per- 
form so much of the world's work himself as 
to leave no scope for the creative activities 
of free men. There must be a veritable 
partnership in labor between men and God, 
if men are to make the best use of the free- 
dom which has been bestowed upon them. 

This question as to the importance of 
labor for the development of the free spirit 
brings us at once to the relation of men to 
physical nature. The largest part of the 
effort of the human race is to win a subsist- 
ence from the earth. As long as this is true 
the activities of men as they work upon and 

67 



68 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

with nature should be the most consequential 
of any for training in freedom and for the 
culture of the spiritual interests. The eight 
or ten or twelve hours of work each day in 
earning a hvehhood should be the chief 
means of grace by which the spiritual quaH- 
ties are developed, and by which all rehgious 
behef s are put to the test as to their deepest 
\4tality and worth. If half, or more, of a 
man's waking hours are to be devoted to the 
struggle for daily bread, a first duty of 
Christianity is to make the conditions of that 
struggle such that the toiler can get at least 
half liis opportunity for free spiritual hfe 
there. 

The first problem of man in dealing with 
nature is just to win from nature a large 
enough supply of material goods for his ade- 
quate maintenance. Freedom means, at 
the outset, the conquest of the earth to such 
an extent that physical factors cease to be a 
crushing burden. The primary need of 
man is enough to eat and enough to wear 
and enough heat to generate energy for his 
comfort and for his work. It is sometimes 
charged against masses of men that they are 
too absorbingly interested in the production 



THE DAILY TASK 69 

of material goods. If men pm'sue earthly- 
goods as an end in themselves, they are to 
be condemned. But there hardly can be 
any worthier human aim than that of in- 
creasing the supply of physical goods which 
can be used as instruments for releasing the 
higher faculties of the mind and heart. Let 
us say all we please about materiahsm, we 
must not forget that any social system will 
sooner or later be judged by its success in 
bringing forth larger and larger amounts 
of physical goods. 

The present writer believes that the capi- 
taUstic system as we see it will in the next 
generation or two be very seriously modi- 
fied, but the modification will have for its 
aim not the decrease of the supplies of capi- 
tal in the world, but the increase of those 
supplies. There is only too good reason 
to beheve that capitahsm's methods of pro- 
duction are unnecessarily wasteful. The 
arguments for an increasing control of in- 
dustry by the workers themselves will be 
based on the promise of an enlarged effec- 
tiveness of the industrial system. If the 
motive of service for the common good 
can be made so potent that that motive 



70 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

will cause two blades of grass to grow where 
one now grows under the capitahstic system, 
or two steel rails to be shaped where one 
is now turned out, the workaday success of 
the nobler motive will be by no means the 
least argument in its justification. 

Men simply must have the material things. 
And the ideal considerations in industry 
must at last come to the test of their practical 
efiiciency. If a nation should find itself so 
threatened by the aggressions of warhke 
neighbors that only a monarchical form of 
government would seem to provide adequate 
defense, that nation would speedily set up a 
king in spite of all the arguments about the 
right of the people to rule. One argument 
for the rule of the people is that even a whole 
people fighting with a common purpose is 
more effective than a nation under the auto- 
cratic sway of a king. If social advance 
leaves the people permanently hungry the 
people will reinstate any industrial system 
that promises more wheat or corn. We may 
well believe that the meek will one day in- 
herit the earth, but they will not keep the 
inheritance long if they do not produce more 
food and more clothing and better tools than 



THE DAILY TASK 71 

the haughty produce. If the reign of the 
meek means that the people are to be 
hungrier, the haughty will be reinstated by 
overwhelming popular vote. 

This is not at all meant as cynicism or 
even as pleasantry. It is not an exalta- 
tion of greed. It is not intended as a de- 
nial of the doctrine that man should not live 
by bread alone, but we have heard alto- 
gether too much about the sweet uses of ad- 
versity and about the smooth sea making the 
poor sailor. A distinguished sociologist re- 
cently has told us that religion is not de- 
pendent upon material prosperity, that the 
world rehgions like Mohammedanism and 
Judaism, and even Christianity, have been 
born in the desert where the life is proverb- 
ially simple to the verge of asceticism. This 
is all well enough, but ignores the fact that 
a more complex type of life than desert ex- 
istence calls for a more complex set of re- 
ligious activities. The very fact that people 
in prosperous times misuse the abundance 
of physical goods is a call for a larger appH- 
cation of the gospel in the right use of the 
goods. 

It is indeed true that if we should drop 



Tg PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

out of religious history all the sainthness 
that has been developed by struggle against 
an adverse lot, we should have precious 
little left; but such putting of the argu- 
ment does not express the full or ultimate 
truth. Let anyone who has struggled up 
through a season of adversity honestly 
ask himself whether he could not through 
the same effort have reached a better de- 
velopment under more prosperous circum- 
stances. For illustration, recall the con- 
solation we sometimes give the youth who 
is working his way through college. We 
tell him of the heroic scholars who have 
thus labored to keep soul and body together 
while they were improving their minds. 
But every one who gives such advice knows 
that the same amount of effort expended in 
direct collegiate activities that is expended 
by the working student in earning his Uving 
and studying his books at the same time, 
would lead to the better scholastic result. If 
it is urged that in the direct collegiate ac- 
tivity the same amount of effort would not 
be put forth, the reply is that this is just the 
center of the whole issue, namely, to teach a 
devotion which will put into richest use the 



THE DAILY TASK 7eS 

richest prosperities. Sweet indeed are the 
uses of adversity — when we have adversity 
of somebody else in mind. But sweeter still 
are, or can be, the uses of prosperity. The 
smooth sea, indeed, makes a poor sailor if he 
will not rouse himself to the utmost when 
the sea is smooth. But any sailor of ordi- 
nary sense knows that the smooth sea is the 
opportunity for the boiler and the turbine 
and the propeller. 

Not only is there a demand for a produc- 
tion of a greater quantity of goods for the 
sake of the spiritual result, but also impera- 
tive necessity to find how to produce these 
goods without such heavy fatigue as is now 
laid upon the muscles and nerves of laborers. 
It is utter folly to exhort a tired man or 
woman or child to live a free hfe. If free- 
dom means being oneself, we may ask how 
many people are themselves when they are 
tired. A mind is not itself until it is fully 
awake, or until the nervous system is so 
steady as to prevent irritability and merely 
automatic reaction. Moreover, the goods 
must be produced with such opportunity for 
leisure as will make possible the creative 
brooding out of which comes the most 



74 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

abundant measure of material advance, to 
say nothing of spiritual progress. With the 
heavy burdens rolled off men's shoulders to 
the levers of machinery and with the routine 
duties more and more discharged by labor- 
saving devices the workers of the world will 
have a chance to think — even about the proc- 
esses in which they are engaged. The most 
useful man in the industrial community may 
be the man who has apparently least to do. 
He may be the patient brooder out of whose 
apparent dreaminess new machines and new 
systems are created. 

It all comes back to the broader concep- 
tion of freedom, of freedom not merely as 
absence of constraint but as positive enjoy- 
ment of all one's faculties. It is to be re- 
gretted that in the economic world the strug- 
gle for freedom has been thus far mostly 
to get rid of unspeakable burdens. Gen- 
uine freedom in the industrial realm would 
be the positive enjoyment of the play of 
inventive and organizational talent and of 
the kingly consciousness of mastery over 
nature. It would provide more place for 
the exercise of that instinct of contrivance 
of which economic thinkers like Taussig 



THE DAILY TASK 75 

make so much. Can we imagine anything for 
the economic advancement of the race com- 
parable to such a change in the social system 
as would enable even the ordinary worker to 
enter with zest into his task somewhat as the 
highest type of professional specialist or 
artistic genius throws himself with consum- 
ing passion into his work for the work's own 
sake? The Christian Church never will be- 
hold convincing setting forth of Christianity 
until there is economic freedom for men in 
this positive degree. Taken the world over, 
the workers at present are too benumbed to 
know much of positive hberty. They are 
too hungry or they are too cold. About as 
well ask an Eskimo, wrapping himself in a 
polar bear skin and tasting no food but 
whale blubber, to enter on the expansive and 
free creative experience, as to ask those who 
do the heavy work of the world to be free in 
the full measure. 

Popular opinion has thus a divine right 
to insist that the social system be so trans- 
formed that the judgments on a man's spir- 
itual attainments may lie justly in the field 
of his practical daily activities. To a degree 
the common sense of man has always in- 



76 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

sisted upon judging the Christian by his 
daily work. We have heard from the begin- 
ning that a worshiper's profession on Sun- 
day must be judged by what he does on 
week-days; and we know, of course, that 
week-days are ahnost wholly given over to 
labor. Even as to those personal and indi- 
vidual peculiarities in which a man reveals 
his character the standard must largely be 
found in how he carries on his daily work. 
A fundamental virtue is honesty. Honesty 
is not merely refraining from seizing things 
that do not belong to one, nor refraining 
from telhng lies. Honesty is integrity and 
sincerity. It is putting oneself wholly into 
one's work. It is the utterance of the truth 
not only by one's hps but also by the honest 
use of one's hands. 

Any social organization which makes it 
possible for the worker to throw himself 
more thoroughly into his task must be looked 
upon as in so far, at least, divine. Any 
organization which does not provide this 
possibihty must be remade. The daily 
tasks of men consume the most of their 
time and the most of their energy. They 
call for the best that men have. If men 



THE DAILY TASK 77 

are not to show their devotion to the di- 
vine by the spirit and zest with which they 
work, there is not left any other field of equal 
consequence in which they can bring the 
religious impulse to play. Possibly no more 
decisive proof of irrationahty in the universe 
could be adduced than that which would 
make it appear that the division between 
secular and sacred is not finally to be 
obhterated. 

We have spoken of the freedom which 
goes with the reahzation of mastery over 
nature. We must say, further, that this 
consciousness of freedom develops even 
more markedly as men cooperate with one 
another in the performance of the bread- 
winning duties. We hear much in these 
days of social unrest concerning questions 
like collective bargaining. We do not say 
enough about the spiritual possibihties in a 
more closely organized body of workers. It 
is easy to make a showy argument for capi- 
tal's dealing with laborers individually on 
the ground that the laborer's freedom is 
thus more surely secured. The argument is 
really farcical to the verge of the ridiculous, 
for such individual bargaining may reduce 



78 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

the laborer to virtual slavery. In such 
argument it is customary to elaborate on the 
danger that an association of workers may 
coerce the individual worker and thus rob 
him of his liberty. All this is to miss the 
positive aspect of freedom — the freedom 
that arises out of the laborer's throwing him- 
self into cooperation with those for whom 
he can cherish a feeling of partnership and 
brotherhood. Without any regard to what 
such associations of workers may do when 
they are badly led, or when appeals are 
made to them on the basis of a selfish class 
interest, or when their fighting blood is up, 
the fact remains that there must be such 
cooperative association if the individual 
laborer is to get the most of and for himself 
out into expression. 

This is manifestly true in a society of 
highly subdivided and specialized tasks in 
which no single laborer is personally re- 
sponsible for a completed product. The 
interest that the individual once took in 
turning out a creation which was from 
start to finish his own is no longer preva- 
lent. The best substitute for it is devo- 
tion to a group of workers whose cause 



THE DAILY TASK 79 

the individual makes his own. In this 
thought of union in a group the ideal is 
clearly that the individual is to find himself 
reenf orced and drawn out of himself by that 
something which we call esprit de corps; and 
being drawn out of oneself is mdispensable 
for spiritual growth. It is easy to condemn 
class consciousness, but class consciousness, 
mistaken and distorted as it sometimes is, is 
better than individualistic consciousness of 
the isolated type. The separate individual 
outside of close association in work with his 
fellows may be free from external con- 
straint. The channels may be blocked 
through which others may reach him to 
coerce him. But if the others cannot reach 
him to coerce him, they cannot reach him to 
help him, and he cannot in turn reach them. 
The channels of intercommunication must 
be kept open. They imply, indeed, the 
possibility of the submergence of the indi- 
vidual for a time, but such submergence by 
the inrushing thought and feeling of the 
group may in the end fertilize the individual 
consciousness into spiritual fertility. And to 
doubt whether such association will in the 
end produce more and better material goods 



80 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

is to doubt the working of one of the most 
obvious laws of human behavior. 

In this field of association in work we have 
a most significant sphere for the genuinely 
Christian virtues. It is here that loyalty 
comes to its most decisive crisis. To be 
loyal to one's fellows when that may mean 
for the moment a diminution of one's own 
supply of worldly goods is an acid test. So 
also with the virtue of generosity. Gen- 
erosity seldom means anything until it 
reaches down into the daily work. Common 
sense has not gone astray in its assumption 
that the Christian's daily task is the realm 
in which his Christianity is to be judged. 
There is a thoroughly sound reason back 
of the behef that a just and responsible 
God must judge men indeed by the ideals 
which they hold in their inner hfe, but 
that the judgment must finally rest upon 
the degree to which these ideals find ex- 
pression in the processes of bread-win- 
ning. There is equally sound reason for the 
demand that the bread-winning processes be 
so Christianized as to make them a fair field 
for moral and spiritual judgments. 

Beyond the self-reahzation of the worker 



THE DAILY TASK 81 

in companionship with his fellows lies that 
ampler circle of spiritual expansion in which 
the motive of desire for gain for oneself and 
for one's class gives way to the motive of 
desire for service of the whole. Before such 
impulse to service can become compelhng 
there will have to be very considerable reor- 
ganization of the present industrial scheme. 
The faults of the present system are not 
solely in inequahties of distribution, though 
such inequalities are a grave count against 
our estabHshed order. The deeper-going 
trouble is that the present system does not 
allow the impulse to service — which is the 
distinctively Christian impulse — the oppor- 
tunity for free play. A coal miner busy 
among dangerous gases can hardly be ex- 
pected to feel his energies streaming forth 
under the inspiration of an ideal of service 
when he knows that of every ton he mines 
so many pounds become forthwith the 
possession of an absentee owner who does 
not know the difference between a coal mine 
and the Milky Way, so far as any personal 
experience goes. We may rightly have 
scant sympathy with the socialistic attack 
upon the payment of interest for the hire of 



82 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

money, especially when that money comes 
out of the earnings and savings of the 
lender. The case is widely different, how- 
ever, when we count up the profits accruing 
oftentimes in excess to owners and specu- 
lators in treasures of the earth which the 
owners have never done a stroke to produce 
or improve. There are many natural re- 
sources hke mines and forests and water- 
powers which we may legitimately claim 
should belong to mankind as a whole. There 
will be necessary some change in our system 
which will make it possible for the workman 
to feel that he is serving an entire com- 
munity of men all doing some valuable 
work, rather than a limited number of 
private owners planning chiefly for their 
own profit. Any changes in the system 
ought to proceed under the direction of 
cool-headed, constructive social engineers, 
but one motive for such change ought to be 
the increase of spiritual opportunity and the 
wider freedom which will result as the work- 
ers know that they are indeed serving the 
total community. 

This chapter may seem to some to have 
ignored the truth that men cannot live by 



THE DAILY TASK 8» 

bread alone. It must not be forgotten that 
we are thinking of bread and clothes and 
houses and tools simply as the instruments 
of a high state of spiritual freedom. We 
admit that the utilization of material abun- 
dance for the loftiest and finest spiritual 
aims approaches very nearly to moral and 
spiritual miracle. One reason why ad- 
versity has made more saints than pros- 
perity is because of the severer moral exac- 
tions made by prosperity. Jesus said that 
it is easier for a camel to go through the eye 
of a needle than for a rich man to enter the 
kingdom of heaven, but he immediately 
added that with God this miracle is possible. 
The Christian ideal, at least for the ultimate 
state of things, is that all earthly forces shall 
serve the interests of the spiritual life. We 
have said repeatedly that Christian common 
sense is wilhng to suspend judgment upon 
the Creator until the evidence is all in. But 
just men everywhere would condemn a uni- 
verse in which even the stars in their courses 
did not at last fight for righteousness. 

To bring about such a consumimation it is 
incumbent on Christian prophets to pro- 
claim the duty of utihzing increasing pros- 



84 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

perity for the sake of the souls of men. It 
would be a handsome solution of this diffi- 
culty to preach that individuals everywhere 
Are to get all the money possible and then 
give it away, but that is not quite what we 
mean. There is not any outstanding virtue 
in allowing possessing groups to oppress la- 
boring groups that greater simis may go to 
philanthropy. What we must plead for is a 
cooperative commonwealth of God in which 
service shall be not an ideal to be preached 
about, but an ideal to be made actual in the 
effort for daily bread. If the will of God is 
done on earth as it is in heaven, our daily 
bread will come to us in a fashion that sug- 
gests the kingdom of God : that is to say in a 
fashion that suggests that spiritual forces 
have been let loose. What the laborer him- 
self desires is a chance at the higher freedom 
in the very process of procuring bread. A 
distinguished college professor recently de- 
clared that after attending two hundred 
meetings of labor groups he thought labor 
in America would be satisfied with a stiff 
inheritance tax on large fortunes, and the 
progressive diminution of unearned income! 
The impulse toward self-determination in 



THE DAILY TASK 85 

industry had worked all around him and he 
had missed it ! And self-determination is of 
the sum and substance of spiritual freedom 
everywhere. Self-determination, trite as 
the word is Hkely to become, holds up one 
of the noblest spiritual ideals of our time. 



CHAPTER V 

PUBLICITY IX THE KINGDOM 
OF GOD 

A FL^ETHEK expectation which pubhe 
opinion cherishes regarding any ruler or set 
of rulers decreeing the destuiies of human 
subjects is that the spirit and plan of those 
rulers shall be revealed to men just as far 
as men can understand the revelation. Xot 
only does Clu^istianity hold that the Divine 
Ruler is not autocratic and arbitrary, but it 
asserts that he has no secrets which he with- 
holds from men after men are able to com- 
prehend the secrets. We may well rejoice 
that our age makes little of mvsteries in re- 
hgious truth which he out of reach of the 
plain man. 

In the pm-suit of truth some methods have 
been wrought out and some principles dis- 
covered which popular opinion has a right 
to maintain as vahd for the progress of 
knowledge of the kingdom of God. Even 
the Almighty must be mider obhgation to 

86 



PUBLICITY 8T 

reveal to men any knowledge which belongs 
to men, just as fast and as far as men can 
appropriate that knowledge. Knowledge, 
however, is not only a set of data in them- 
selves, but is data grasped by the receiving 
mind. Popular thought sanctions the dic- 
tum that knowledge of any kind must be 
earned, or at least deserved. If a citizen 
of a monarchy desires to know more about 
the doings of his king, he must learn to read 
a newspaper, or to understand the language 
in which the news is communicated. Behev- 
ing as we do that men are free and creative 
agents, the amount of knowledge which they 
will receive about anything depends upon 
the range and intensity of their mental 
energies. Modern psychology, with its 
stress upon the activity of the mind in know- 
ing, has made it evident to us that there is 
no possibiHty of printing truth upon a pas- 
sive intelligence. Passive intelligence is a 
contradiction in terms. If intelligence were 
passive, it would have to become active be- 
fore it could read a message. There is no 
photographing truth upon a passive intel- 
lect. The mind would have to become active 
before it could see or interpret the picture. 



88 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

Common sense everywhere agrees that men 
are entitled only to such knowledge as they 
can understand, provided that the revealer 
of truth is doing aU within his power to 
make his message intelligible. The bi- 
nomial theorem is only for those who can 
understand mathematics. There is no hope 
of making the theorem intelhgible except by 
training the mind to the skill with which it 
can understand. To talk of rights to knowl- 
edge is absurd, apart from the determination 
to take the mental steps necessary to learn. 
In the kingdom of God we must hold that 
knowledge is for those who are wilhng to 
pay the cost of learning, and for any and 
all who are thus wilhng to pay* 

The above statement, however, is not alto- 
gether just. Knowledge may be divided 
into two classes — that which can be mastered 
by the expert alone and that which deals 
with the broad human issues of everyday 
life. We have more of a claim upon this 
latter knowledge than upon the former. In 
treating with an earthly ruler we might say 
that we are not concerned as to the intricate 
and technical processes by which he rules his 
country. In such governmental procedure 



PUBLICITY 89 

the ruler may eaU in experts whose recom- 
mendations depend upon highly intricate 
scientific information. The common mind 
may not understand the technical formulas. 
If any citizen has the inclination and oppor- 
tunity, he may inform himself as to the 
nature of the experts' methods, but the 
ordinary citizen cannot thus become a spe- 
ciahst. That ordinary citizen, however, has 
a right to know the main purpose for which 
the ruler sets his experts to work. So in 
the main on-goings of the kingdom of God 
there is a mass of knowledge which might 
well be called the pecuUar province of the 
expert. Any student who has the chance 
to familiarize himself with such a field has a 
right to enter the field, but the common 
work-a-day hfe has no such chance. That 
common hfe, however, has a right to call for 
knowledge of the purposes and aims which 
rule in the conduct of the universe. Such 
knowledge the Christian Church has always 
maintained to be the center and heart of the 
revelation in Jesus Christ. 

There are some considerations, however, 
that must be again and again urged as con- 
ditions under which even such essential 



90 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

knowledge is granted to men. If it is true 
that the mind is an active agent in knowl- 
edge, we repeat knowledge can come only 
as the mind stirs itself to understand. This 
elementary notion in itself does away at one 
stroke with all claim upon the divine source 
of truth for a mechanically dictated revela- 
tion. Or grant that it might be possible for 
a very meager intelhgence to receive without 
its own initiative an overpowering and over- 
whelming vision in picturesque symbohsm. 
Such a vision could be utihzed only as 
mental force might arise somewhere active 
enough to interpret the vision. It is theo- 
retically imaginable that under contact with 
some higher intelligence a mind might auto- 
matically utter words of which it itself had 
no comprehension. The mind might become 
solely a transmitting mechanism speaking 
the words. Such revelation, however, could 
not be of value to the race until the arrival 
of the interpretative mind, and that inter- 
pretative mind necessarily would be an 
active mind. Just here lies the justification 
for the demand for education in the king- 
dom of God. We are not so much con- 
cerned with the religious genius who first 



PUBLICITY 91 

proclaims a high truth as with the common 
understanding and utihzation of that truth. 
For such utihzation on the broad scale 
there must be the most abundant training of 
the popular mind. 

Conmion sense urges, moreover, that the 
most valuable knowledge is that which is 
born out of experience. It is altogether too 
true that common sense is apt somewhat 
narrowly to hmit the conception of experi- 
ence, but common sense here moves on the 
right track. Of course the man who reasons 
out an abstract system is experiencing his 
truth, but common sense intends by experi- 
ence some more vital connection with the 
world of men and things. Hence it has 
come to pass that in rehgion the people hsten 
most readily to knowledge based upon ex- 
perience. The founder of the kingdom of 
God himself said that it was by doing the 
will of God that men would come to a 
knowledge of the truth. Evidently, Jesus 
referred to something other than knowledge 
of a theological or an abstract nature. 
Knowledge in common life rests upon an 
assurance for which formal reasons cannot 
always be satisfactorily given. We simply 



92 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

know that some things are so, out of our 
experience, as we say. Convictions as to 
the presence of God and as to the worth and 
meaning of human hfe are a settled deposit 
from doing the will of God. In this sense 
there is spacious room for authority in the 
realm of religious knowledge. It is some- 
times declared that utterances are true, re- 
gardless of who utters them. In recent 
days, especially, attempt has been made to 
take the edge off hostile biblical criticism 
which studies chiefly questions of author- 
ship, by affirming that bibhcal truth is truth, 
no matter who is its author. This contention 
is correct enough for the purposes which it 
is intended to serve. In a deeper meaning, 
however, everything depends upon who 
utters the religious truth. The word takes 
its soundest effectiveness from its being the 
utterance of him who has given himself most 
heartily to the doing of what he conceives to 
be the divine will. 

This doing of the divine will can only 
mean the attempt to take whatever under- 
standing one has of the divine purpose, 
and to work that understanding into some 
vital expression in the matter-of-fact world. 



PUBLICITY 93 

Now, the common mind thoroughly appre- 
ciates the difficulty of doing this. There 
is no sterner task before men than that 
of seizing a moral ideal and of making 
it real on earth and among men. The 
process seems at times to be one of hope- 
lessly involved compromise. If we can- 
not make the divine ideal stand out as a 
whole, we try to make it stand out in part. 
If we cannot do the ideally best, we do the 
best we can. Without suggesting at all 
that Jesus was ever guilty of moral compro- 
mise, we may properly say that incarnation 
itself implies a progressive adjustment of 
spirit to things as they are — living spirit act- 
ing and reacting against the earthly environ- 
ment in which it finds itself. It is for such 
reasons that the ordinary mind has been 
very lenient with the Christian workers who 
have again and again made even very serious 
mistakes. In the opinion of the average 
mortal the highest form of intelligence is 
just that which comes out of experience, and 
the ordinary man has more patience with 
one who learns by his attempt to work the 
truth into life, than with one who sees more 
clearly the abstract and speculative prin- 



94 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

ciple, but who somehow fails to make con- 
nection with the world as it is. We shall 
always hail with due acclaim those who 
phrase the transcendent ideals, but, after all, 
noble laurels are for those who make their 
discoveries of truth in the fearful battle to 
make ideals real. In a later chapter we 
speak of the duty of the church to lift the 
ideals uncompromisingly on high, but we do 
not mean mere talk about ideals. 

Once more, the people recognize the im- 
portance of the knowledge which we may 
characterize as socially acquired. In the 
preceding paragraph we have spoken of the 
knowledge which issues from a contest with 
a system of things which is tough and in- 
tractable. Modern educational methods 
make much of what they call the laboratory 
method, by which they mean the face-to-face 
handhng of facts themselves. Essentially, 
this method is of value, as we have said, in 
gaining knowledge of the kingdom of God, 
as keeping check upon religious utterance 
by the touch with objective facts. Advanc- 
ing a step further, pedagogy recognizes that 
much of the best knowledge comes to light 
out of the atmosphere created as students 



PUBLICITY 95 

work together. It would be interesting to 
ask how many first-rank discoveries in the 
history of knowledge have been made as 
thinkers have worked alone. We know that 
the greatest findings have come as some in- 
dividual explorer has proved more energetic 
or quicker in reaching a goal than his fel- 
lows. To recur to a previous illustra- 
tion, immortal honor always belongs to 
Columbus for the discovery of America. 
There is not anywhere in the annals of ex- 
ploration a story of firmer determination in 
the soul of an individual seeker after truth 
than the biography of Columbus. Never- 
theless, as we said in preceding pages, many 
others were wresthng with the same prob- 
lem, and within a few years somebody would 
have hit upon the true explanation. In a 
less intense degree the search for knowledge 
in times of peace is like the search for knowl- 
edge in times of war. We have all heard 
that the great World War closed with a half 
dozen nations on the edge of the uncovering 
of most important material secrets — how to 
manufacture deadlier gases or huger bomb- 
ing machines or more frightful destructive 
monsters on land or sea. There was social 



96 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

cooperation in the quest for all these things, 
as there usually is in the quest of imperative 
knowledge in any form. A social atmos- 
phere makes a demand for definite answers 
to definite questions and consciously or un- 
consciously men cooperate in the search for 
the answers. 

We repeatedly urge the attention upon 
this important social law by which men in 
cooperation attain to higher flights of under- 
standing than men plodding along as 
separate and unrelated units. As men of a 
group focus their sight toward the same 
object something in the associated effort 
sharpens the eyesight of each. To take a 
rough physical analogy, we might say that 
the phenomenon is somewhat, though not 
quite, similar to the development of mechan- 
ical power in a complexly organized modern 
engine. Suppose the engine to be of one 
hundred horse power. Now, one hundred 
horses running together cannot, indeed, run 
much faster than one horse running alone, 
or longer than one horse can run; but it 
might be possible so to harness the horses to 
a power shaft that by pulling together their 
united energies might release a new force 



PUBLICITY 97 

like electricity propelling a vehicle at a 
speed many times faster than a horse could 
run, and many times longer than a horse 
could run. So in the social body organized 
mental and spiritual energies seem to get 
hold of invisible power shafts which release 
energies inconceivable as the exploit of any 
one mind studying by itself. Here, again, 
we need not fall into the fallacy of a social 
mind apart from the individual minds in a 
society. We need only to recognize that 
the minds act with finer quahties and larger 
quantitative efficacy when they pull together 
than when they pull separately. He that 
loses his own life in pouring that life into the 
common effort finds himself a sharer in a 
result which he could never have hoped to 
beget alone. There is a Scripture passage 
which tells us that upon one occasion Jesus 
was seen by more than five hundred behev- 
ers at once. Without entering into the 
question of miracle, it is altogether possible 
to maintain that the intense actions and re- 
actions back and forth in a group of hun- 
dreds looking in the same spiritual direction 
could carry the vision of the group farther 
than any one man could see alone. More 



98 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

and more this social factor will become a 
power for discovery of religious truth. 

"Blessed are the pure in heart: for they 
shall see God." These words were no doubt 
spoken with reference to the contrast be- 
tween the inner purity of the spirit and the 
superficial outer purity of a ceremonial 
cleansing. The inner purity is the purity 
of unselfishness. Such purity is not attained 
except in close social relationships. By 
throwing itself more and more into the pur- 
suit of the good of the whole, the mind 
speeds away from the narrowly selfish view- 
point, and arrives at a New Testament 
purity. We shall have occasion later to 
speak of the authority of the individual who 
works alone and pubhshes from the house- 
top the revelations which have been made to 
him in the closet, but such revelations take 
on the highest power from the unselfishness 
of the housetop proclamation. The effect 
of modern social contacts on spiritual dis- 
covery has not yet been enough investigated. 
The commonplace that pupils learn better in 
a school has not been treated with due ap- 
preciation. We have advocated social or- 
ganization chiefly as a means for the ampler 



PUBLICITY 99 

production of material things. We are just 
at the beginning of a realization of the 
possibihties of closer social organization for 
the seizure of the higher truth. Recurring 
to the illustration of the school, do we not all 
feel that in much of our learning our fellow 
pupils have been the educators? With all 
possible honor to competent instructors and 
profound investigators, our companionship 
with other students has not only steadied 
and corrected our individual eccentricities 
but has led to long strides ahead in the con- 
quest of knowledge itself. The very human- 
ness of the relationships in a school, the in- 
evitabihty of subjecting the intellectual re- 
sults to the play of other motives than the 
intellectual, the spirit of humor which so 
lavishly abounds, the more or less conscious 
estimate of values in terms of their social 
consequences — all these are potent educa- 
tive factors. They can be made use of, and 
they will be more purposefully made use of 
some day in the quest of religious enhght- 
enment. 

Again, the intelligence which we are 
pleased to call that of the plain man knows 
that only those are entitled to know who can 



100 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

be depended upon to make right use of what 
they know. Just as there must be responsi- 
bility in modern society for the use of power, 
so there must be responsibihty hkewise for 
the use of knowledge. God's omniscience 
puts as heavy a responsibihty on him as 
his omnipotence, for knowledge is power. 
Even in our everyday contacts we feel imder 
no obligation to disclose to our neighbors 
what is peculiarly our own. No matter 
how thoroughly sociahzed the human race 
may one day become, we may be confident 
that we never shall become socialized to such 
degree as to allow prying inquisition into 
affairs that are by nature private. This 
does not mean, of course, that we are to he 
to neighbors who ask impertinent questions, 
but it does mean that we are not bound to 
teU them what is not their business. One of 
the greatest practical virtues, recognized as 
such by sensible men everywhere, is just the 
virtue of minding one's own business. Now, 
the reason is that knowledge belongs to 
those who will use it aright. The neighbor 
cannot make good use of knowledge that is 
mine alone. 

The principle here leads us pretty far. 



PUBLICITY 101 

In the larger social reaches the responsi- 
bility for the right use of knowledge is 
even more binding, and becomes more im- 
perative with every increase of knowledge. 
It would be a frightful calamity for the 
himian race to attain to the huge powers 
which come with increased organization un- 
less there grows with knowledge a conscious- 
ness of responsibihty. In spite of all the 
wars which have sprung out of the separate- 
ness of the races through differences of 
language and temperament, it is doubtful if 
the destruction would not have been worse 
if the race had come to a reahzation of the 
power in enormous organization before it 
had come to the moral responsibility which 
would enable it to use such power aright. 
The story of the tower of Babel is not with- 
out some trace of abiding significance. 

We would not have this insistence upon 
the right use of knowledge pushed too far. 
A protest was recently voiced against any 
possibiUty of a revelation of a world beyond 
the grave, coming through such a channel as 
a spiritualistic medium, because of the mani- 
fest moral unworthiness of many spiritual 
mediums. This is somewhat overdoing the 



102 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

argument on which we are laying weight. 
It might be possible for a personahty highly 
sensitive to other-world influence to catch 
the vibrations of such influences without be- 
ing himself altogether a model of our con- 
ventional virtues. Nevertheless, if such 
stray quiverings from another world are to 
reach us, we may well hope that the full 
revelation will not take on body and content 
until there is developed among us a social 
conscience strong enough to employ the 
revelation aright. 

We have not yet learned to use correctly 
the fateful possibilities locked up in tighter 
social cohesiveness. The fearful World 
War has put before us the spectacle of a 
nation which has been perhaps the most 
effectively organized in the history of the 
world, shaping its social excellence into 
a war club with which to beat down the 
other nations. In the kingdom of religious 
truth especially we must expect that the 
truth will be earned not solely by the gen- 
uine strivings of one's own will, or by an un- 
selfish devotion to one's fellows, but by grim 
determination to use the truth under a heavy 
bond of obhgation. The moral quahty is 



PUBLICITY 103 

always present in the fuller wisdom. Here, 
again, we detect the true emphasis if we 
watch the long run of the public sentiment. 
To a less degree than we think is the pubhc 
mind misled by the utterances of the bril- 
liant or spectacular orator. Granted all 
that can be urged about the proneness of the 
crowd to run after the leader who is brilhant 
and nothing more, yet such propensity has 
to be very seriously qualified when we reflect 
that interest and applause are not always 
obedient surrender. Even the crowd looks 
for the man whom it can trust. 

Perhaps a word may be permissible about 
the just impatience of ordinary people with 
the revealer of truth who does not make him- 
self understood. The moral responsibility 
for being intelligible is more and more rec- 
ognized by the community at large. Of 
course, if a leader is uttering truth which 
only remotely touches life, and fails to make 
himself understood, the majority of the 
hearers quietly pass by on the other side. 
But if the leader has caught a glimpse of 
something of eternal value, his responsibility 
does not cease until the truth is really 
uttered ; and the truth is not uttered until it 



104 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

is understood. Hence the element of justice 
in the popular demand that men be held re- 
sponsible for what they are understood to 
say. With every regard for those conscien- 
tious and sincere prophets who blurt out 
their revelations with their eyes closed to the 
effect on their audience, the popular sense 
more and more will have it that it is the duty 
of the professed teacher of truth to make 
himself understood. 

This is not to contradict what we have 
previously said about the impossibihty of 
revealing truth except to an active intelli- 
gence. Some misunderstanding is bound 
to come; even if the truth is intelligible, 
it may be intelligible for only a little dis- 
tance, and may lead off to the unmeas- 
ured depths. Or some truth may be over- 
stated for the sake of arousing attention : we 
are not thinking of this, but of careless and 
shoddy and impatient speech which does 
social harm through the lack of that funda- 
mental honesty and human kindliness which 
show themselves in a determination to cut 
away all the needless obstacles to understand- 
ing. We say that it is dishonest for a man 
to ignore facts as he speaks. It is almost as 



PUBLICITY 106 

dishonest to ignore the human hearers to 
whom the facts are spoken. 

In discussing a theme hke this it is not 
possible to avoid a word about mysticism. 
Has not the popular intelligence always fol- 
lowed the mystic? Has not the very other- 
worldliness of the mystic made deep appeal 
to the dwellers in this world? The reply 
must be somewhat in the affirmative, but the 
appeal at the present time, in the glare of 
the full day, hardly will be successful if 
made just to a craving for the unusual and 
unearthly. There is nevertheless a mysti- 
cism which more and more compels popular 
respect — the mysticism of him whose knowl- 
edge arises apparently spontaneously from 
inner springs. There are mystics — men 
who speak out of swift intuition — in many 
walks of Hfe besides the specifically religious. 
Such mystics sometimes merely announce 
conclusions, and leave to others the search 
for the reasons. 

There is nothing more amusing than the 
discrepancy between the rules to account 
for their success given by successful lead- 
ers in any sphere who have risen above 
rules and the actual skill which these lead- 



106 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

ers reveal in their different spheres of ac- 
tion. Out of long nights of brooding and 
days of practice, the successful worker ar- 
rives at an unerring sureness in the mat- 
ters over which he is master. He reaches 
the stage where he cannot tell why he does 
thus and so. He simply does. By faithful 
observance of law he has climbed to what 
seems a freedom from laws. And so in the 
vahd mysticism of rehgious life. Out of 
practice in doing the will of God there re- 
sults similar correct sureness as to what is 
the will of God in an individual or social 
crisis. Out of meditation and study and 
prayer and walk in the way of the Lord 
there is born that mysterious sense of direc- 
tion which is altogether natural to the 
mature saint and seer, but which is so 
mysterious to the uninitiated onlooker and 
bystander. The reason the word of the seer 
attains wide acceptance is not because it is 
strange, but because something in the human 
heart catches in it the rush and freshness of 
the springs of hfe. Did Joan of Arc lead 
the hosts of France to victory solely because 
her reports of ghostly visions and voices cast 
a spell upon the multitude? The reason 



PUBLICITY 107 

was that the patriotism of France felt in the 
absorbed devotion of Joan of Arc some firm 
hold on the forces that were most elementary 
and fundamental. There is an unerring dis- 
cernment which sooner or later becomes the 
possession of the plain people, to the effect 
that the exact logical processes and the 
heavy rules by which men study are just so 
many tools to help on to a worthy under- 
standing. There is always a shade of dis- 
trust of these as artificial, and always re- 
spect for the type of mind and soul which at 
last arrives at the ability to know truth by its 
"feel" and to catch the finer stirrings of 
spirit by quick intuition. 

Let us not forget that freedom of which 
we made so much in the earher pages. The 
only channel for the revelation of religious 
truth which men will long respect is the free 
person. Men would resent any revelation 
which robbed them of their freedom, or 
which bluntly told them to obey, whether 
there was any reason for obeying or not. It 
is from this point of view that the whole 
problem of what we call inspiration must be 
approached. If inspiration is from God, we 
must insist that one sign of the inspiration is 



108 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

the positive and not merely negative free- 
dom of the inspired agent. Only from the 
free who are free not merely in liberty from 
constraint, but free in positive reahzation 
within themselves of the truth which they 
proclaim, can we grasp the truth which is the 
liberty of the sons of God. 



CHAPTER VI 
THE DIVINE FRIENDSHIP 

Popular opinion demands as a matter of 
course that a ruler of men be friendly to 
men. While we know that under the actual 
circumstances of human society personal in- 
tercourse on the part of a ruler with any 
considerable number of individuals is out of 
the question, the people nevertheless expect 
that whoever is in governmental control over 
them shall be entirely friendly to them. 
They will not to-day tolerate in a ruler any 
of that kingly bearing which implies that the 
ruler regards himself above those over whom 
he holds sway. When masses of the people 
complain of a leader as ''aristocratic" they 
do not ordinarily intend a complaint against 
the social stratum in which he was born. 
They mean that they resent an overbearing 
or condescending manner. They look for 
friendliness on the basis of mutual respect 
between ruler and people. 

From a somewhat similar angle men look 
109 



110 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

for friendliness in the Divine Ruler, though 
naturally any thought of equahty between 
God and man is out of the question except in 
this one essential of meeting on the basis of 
mutual respect. The doctrine of the love of 
God has been carelessly handled in much 
Christian teaching. We have had occasion 
elsewhere to remark upon the altogether 
normal and human nature of the demand 
that the love of God toward men shall arrive 
at the mutual regard of complete friendship. 
It is possible for us to love those whom we 
do not think of as our friends. It is con- 
ceivable that in the family husband and wife 
might experience mutual affection without 
even being friends. They might be devoted 
to one another without ever entering into 
partnership of ideals or of tasks. A father 
might be deeply in love with his children and 
yet his affection might be that doting fond- 
ness which never would respect the growing 
independence of the young wills. The 
father might desire the children to remain 
children forever just that he might be fond 
of them. In any ideal family, on the other 
hand, the children become more interesting 
as they grow older, and more of a joy as 



THE DIVINE FRIENDSHIP 111 

they enter into companionship with their 
parents — the companionship being founded 
on mutual regard and respect. So in think- 
ing of the heavenly Father who rules us, the 
majority of us desire not so much a love 
which is to forever regard us as children as 
a friendship which is to respect us as men. 
There is no more splendid ideal for God in 
the Scriptures and no loftier teaching con- 
cerning man than that God and man can 
walk together in friendship and companion- 
ship. Certainly no scriptural ideal com- 
mends itself more fully to the common 
understanding. 

It may be interesting to push this ideal of 
friendship between God and man out into 
something of its implications. There is im- 
plied, to begin with, a willingness on God's 
part to accommodate himself to men. In 
the Scriptures the relationship between men 
and God is spoken of as a walk together. 
We most often think of walking with God 
as a lengthening of the human stride to keep 
pace with the Divine. The half truth here 
should not blind us to the other half, namely, 
that the walk with God requires that God 
accommodate his step to the pace of men. 



112 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

"Accommodation" carries with it a sugges- 
tion of moral compromise which often ob- 
scures the inner nobihty of the idea. Two 
men who are friends show their friendship 
in nothing more than in their attempt to ad- 
just themselves each to the understanding 
of the other. It is not friendship to blurt 
out one's thought to one's companion with- 
out regard to the intellectual or tempera- 
mental limitations of that friend. When 
the argument was first advanced that the 
Christian Scriptures show the accommoda- 
tions of the divine intelligence to the human 
intelligence, some sticklers for the absolute 
perfection of God seemed to think that any 
accommodation to men's Kmitations would 
be altogether unworthy as derogatory to the 
divine dignity. A surer insight discerns 
that there is no better indication of the 
friendliness of God toward men than just 
the signs of the accommodation of the divine 
to the human. To be friends with God we 
must indeed lengthen our step. To be 
friends of men God must shorten his step. 

On the side of man friendship must take 
on that form of faith which trusts God when 
the appearances are against him. The com- 



THE DIVINE FRIENDSHIP 113 

mon man will not hear of any other sort of 
friendship. A passage in the book of the 
Hebrews tells us that the Old Testament 
heroes all died in the faith, not having re- 
ceived the promise. That ''not" might seem 
to some to have shpped into the Scriptures 
by mistake. We often speak of the men of 
faith as if they were chiefly those who were 
always seeing their promises fulfilled. Just a 
moment's reflection, however, ought to show 
that it requires no surpassing trust to believe 
in a promise that is openly being satisfied. 
We trust when we still believe in promises 
that are not fulfilled. The lack of fulfill- 
ment does not mean that the Divine Ruler is 
not to be trusted. If rule over the universe 
means anything it means that the divine 
plan must run out beyond the reach of the 
mind of man. If man's trust in God means 
anything, it must mean the willingness to 
trust God when his plan cannot be under- 
stood. If earthly statesmen sometimes work 
for the future with a sweep of the imagina- 
tion which is altogether beyond the mental 
compass of their fellows, how absurd for 
men who claim to be friends of God to com- 
plain because they cannot see the outwork- 



ii4j public opinion and theology 

ing of the divine plan. The common sense 
of the street is wiser than this. 

We would not, however, dismiss this prob- 
lem quite so summarily. Firmly beheving 
in the friendhness of God toward men, we 
also believe in the complete willingness of 
masses of mankind to trust God as their 
friend. Men will not beheve that the uni- 
verse is unfriendly. A very noteworthy 
criticism recently appeared on the work of 
Henri Barbusse, the French hterary master 
who came to prominence through his de- 
scriptions of the terrible aspects of the Great 
War. Probably no writer of our day has 
succeeded more graphically in portraying 
the horrors of war than has Barbusse. The 
utter inhumanity and horror of the titanic 
struggle stand out with ghastly sharpness in 
his pages. But when Barbusse went on in 
later literary efforts to picture the entire 
universe as hkewise hopeless and helpless 
the interest in his work seemed to fall off. 
The reason was that men will not continue 
to believe that the universe is at bottom un- 
friendly. We may say if we will that this 
mood of mankind is a narcotic and self -pro- 
tective adjustment to a terribly grim system 



THE DIVINE FRIENDSHIP 115 

of things. But this does not fully explain. 
The hard facts bite deeply into every life; 
but not every life, or any great number of 
lives, give up in abject despair. We may 
say, if we please, that this hopefulness is but 
a constitutional good-humor which by the 
law of psychological periodicity comes 
bubbhng up after the deepest distress. But 
even so, in that hopefulness hes much of the 
charm that makes men worth having as 
friends. The buoyancy of mankind under 
most circumstances is a substantial item to 
be set down to humanity's credit. When the 
cheerfulness is definite trust in the Divine it 
is in turn worthy of the divine confidence 
and cooperation. 

Recurring to our thought of companion- 
ship, we must remember that the best com- 
panionship is a companionship of work. We 
can hardly see how men are to be friends of 
God unless in some integral way the efforts 
of the wills of men count as facts in the uni- 
verse. Some philosophers to-day, notably 
the pluralists, claim for man a share of posi- 
tive creative power. The pluralism of Wil- 
liam James, for example, suggests that man 
is a positive agent laboring side by side with 



116 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

a God who is a positive agent, both men 
and God being finite. In such philosophy 
the will of man creates situations which are 
absolutely original and which can hardly 
have been foreseen even by the intelligence 
of God. It is not necessary to go as far as 
this to make man a force in the universe. If 
we once concede that God has made men 
free and has put in them an impulse toward 
positive self-reahzation, we shall have to 
admit that freedom for men cannot stop far 
short of a really creative potency — ^though 
we are not subscribing to a doctrine of the 
finitude of God. 

We may believe that God need not have 
made man, but once having made him and 
having dowered him with a stirring toward 
progressive spiritual power, he must recog- 
nize that impulse as more and more creative 
in shaping the universe to forms that would 
not have been hkely if man had not been 
created. We can see this readily on the 
negative side. It would be possible for a 
race of free men in the exercise of their free- 
dom to run through, or biu'n up, the 
treasures of the physical earth in a short 
space of time. The presence of man on the 



THE DWINE FRIENDSHIP 117 

earth has ah-eady made stupendous changes, 
in the earth itself, in the animal and vege- 
table kingdoms, and in the relations of men 
one to another. We cannot beheve that aU 
of these changes have had the approval of 
the Almighty. They have come about 
through the misuse of freedom. These ugly 
scars, however, give by contrast a hint of 
the glorious possibihties before men striving 
to make themselves free in positive self- 
reahzation, molding the world over into a 
better dwelhng place and a better vehicle for 
the communication of the good, the true, and 
the beautiful. 

Here we have to watch ourselves lest we 
put men off too much by themselves — as the 
plurahsts almost always do. We are con- 
cerned with the companionship of men with 
God. Just as we found that men become 
free as they attain a firmer control over 
nature, and as they throw themselves more 
deeply into the stream of human life, so we 
must say here that men find themselves most 
truly when they enter into cooperation with 
the Divine, as they seek to discover the 
divine will and to ahgn themselves more 
closely with that will. It would be foohsh 



118 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

for men to think that they could win life and 
freedom by a Robinson Crusoe existence. 
The story of Robinson Crusoe has a last- 
ing charm for men as well as boys, as sug- 
gesting what the human wit can do when it is 
thrown practically upon its own resources 
with the minimum of help from nature and 
no direct aid from man. It must not be for- 
gotten, however, that Crusoe carried to his 
island with him a fimd of knowledge which 
he had appropriated from the general stock 
of human information. To get at what 
Crusoe could really do alone we would have 
to picture him abandoned as a foundling on 
the island — in which state there would have 
been no story of Crusoe. 

Lotze has pointed out to us that in a 
sense every tool mastered by man is a con- 
tinuation of and expansion of the personal 
force of man. Many a writer has given 
us to understand that the invention of the 
lens of the telescope or microscope is an 
extension of the power of the human 
eye, bestowing upon it more sweep and 
firmness. The fact that the human voice 
can carry through a telephone for three 
thousand miles adds as much to a man's 



I 



THE DIVINE FRIENDSHIP 119 

enlarging life as if he could stand on a 
mountain top and shout his word across a 
continent. So in the social relationships, 
contact with one's fellows draws out of the 
individual some new phase of power with 
each contact. This process comes to its 
highest and best as the soul expands through 
dehberately trying to find the will of God 
and to work with that will. There are three 
aspects of the companionship of God with 
men: God's accommodation of himself to 
men, men's dehberately stretching of them- 
selves to meet the divine requirement, and, 
best of all, the absorption of God and men in 
one common task. 

This leads naturally to a word about 
prayer. In complete companionship the 
human hfe loses itself in absorption in the 
divine task. There is a seerhke quahty in 
the modern popular emphasis that behevers 
are not to concern themselves too much with 
thought about their own salvation. Of 
course there is the gravest danger of misun- 
derstanding here. Will the reader please 
remember, however, that we are not speak- 
ing now of sinners or transgressors. We 
are thinking of men and women aiming at 



120 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

doing the divine will. One mark of the 
presence of God in such lives is that they are 
so concerned about the salvation of the 
world in the fullest sense that they do not 
spend much time inquiring about their own 
spiritual states. To be sure, this deliberate 
lack of introspection can soon and easily 
make the advice to begin the salvation of the 
world by setting one's own house in order 
directly pertinent. After all, though, a sign 
of companionship with God is the outward 
gaze upon the task to be accomplished. If 
this be true, intercession becomes the prime 
aspect of prayer conceived of as petition. 
We find a meaningful hint here from the 
character of so many of the biblical prayers 
as social and intercessory. The Lord's 
prayer itself is fundamentally the expres- 
sion of the needs of a group. 

And here some man will ask: ''If God is a 
friend of man, how can my prayer make him 
any more friendly? Prayer, then, must be 
for my own sake, that I may feel my friend- 
liness toward other men intensified." If 
this were the whole truth about intercessory 
prayer, it would be enough to make interces- 
sion abundantly worth while. If by carry- 



THE DIVINE FRIENDSHIP 121 

ing to God the wants of my fellows I come 
to ampler and better understanding of those 
needs myself , surely the spiritual effort has 
been worth while. We do not pray to make 
God feel more kindly toward men. After 
we have prayed our utmost we do not care 
for our fellows as he cares for them. 

This whole problem, however, takes on a 
different look when we contemplate the na- 
ture of a society of free men, bound together 
more or less organically. In creating such an 
organism the Almighty binds himself there- 
after to work through the law of the group. 
It may be that the relation of member to 
member in the organism is such that God 
himself cannot work upon one life until 
other lives are touched and aroused, just as 
in modern medicine the health of the whole 
body must be built up in order to cure one 
diseased member. The object of prayer is 
not to bring God of himself to work upon 
the single isolated soul, but to induce a spir- 
itual atmosphere in which the will of the one 
praying and the will of God himself can 
work together, or an electric surcharging of 
the social mass which gives God his chance. 
Our mistakes at this point sometimes come 



122 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

out of not taking freedom seriously enough. 
If freedom is the fullest self-realization for 
the lives of men, the growing freedom of one 
life must develop a spiritual surplus which 
overflows upon the lives of others. 

Intercessory prayer, then, does not mean 
that the one who is praying wins at last, after 
a period of agony in entreaty, the consent of 
God to bless other men. It would be nearer 
the truth, possibly, to say that because of the 
social knitting of men to men it becomes 
possible for God, through the release of 
forces produced by the prayer of the inter- 
cessor, to work with the praying soul to bless 
the other soul; or, because of the social inter- 
lacings, the uplift of the praying soul may 
be the precondition of the blessing of the 
heart for whom the prayer goes forth. Of 
course any attempted explanation here has 
the appearance of presumption. We do not 
know why things are as they are, but since 
things are as they are we can see some condi- 
tions through which the divine power must 
work and which it must respect. And yet 
such a term as "conditions" may be far from 
hinting at a reahty which is altogether good 
and glorious. It might, indeed, be well for 



THE DIVINE FRIENDSHIP 123 

the Divine Force to press directly upon each 
life as an isolated unit. It may be alto- 
gether more glorious for the Divine to work 
upon men through their companionship with 
other men. 

It may be objected that intercession does 
not of itself touch the center of prayer as 
comimunion with God. For ourselves, how- 
ever, it seems that there is no worthier 
communion than fellowship in work. Still 
there is a most important aspect of prayer 
conceived of as the outreaching of the 
human life toward the Divine Friend. 
There must be something in such outreach- 
ing which cheers the heart of God himself, 
inasmuch as outreaching must in a true 
friendship take on the form of appreciation 
of God. When all is said, quite hkely the 
greatest gift which the human can give the 
Divine is the gift of appreciation. It may 
well be that no thoughts of men are of large 
value to God. It may even be that in our 
words about cooperation with the Divine we 
have overemphasized the human element, 
and that God is not so dependent upon 
human cooperation after all. There hardly 
can be any question, however, that the Cre- 



124 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

ator of men must long for the appreciation 
of men. We might think of the Creator as 
producing the universe in the spirit of a 
divine artist pouring himself out lavishly 
upon a masterpiece. As the source of all 
artistic wisdom such an Artist might, indeed, 
know that his own judgment upon his work 
was final. In the majestic picture in the first 
chapter of Genesis, for example, the Creator 
passes judgment upon his own work as 
good, and at last as very good. It would be 
a strange artistic heart, however, that would 
not find itself warmed by the approval of 
any intelHgence which showed signs of dis- 
cerning insight. The appreciative intelli- 
gence itself might not have any ability be- 
yond that of recognizing the fine touches in 
the artist's masterpiece. But such appreci- 
ation would be a surpassing dehght to the 
creative artist. If only the appreciating 
mind knows when and where to applaud, 
that knowledge is of reenforcing efficiency 
to the skill of the artist. Think of the char- 
acterizations of God by means of which we 
seek to make his nature real to us ! In each 
of these we can legitimately believe that the 
appreciation of men must be a joy to God. 



THE DIVINE FRIENDSHIP 125 

If we conceive of God as Ruler or as 
Father, we can well imagine the significance 
of human appreciation for him. Much more 
must this be true when we think of God as 
the bearer of the burdens of the race and the 
leader of all in self-sacrifice. The burden- 
bearer craves appreciation above all others; 
and if the New Testament accoimt of the 
nature of God is true, the consolation and 
satisfaction to God must be in the apprecia- 
tion of those who have entered into the fel- 
lowship of his sufferings. When we con- 
ceive of friendship of man and God in terms 
of such appreciation we can see new mean- 
ing in the promise of the high destiny of man 
as made to enjoy God forever. 

This leads in turn to a word about immor- 
tahty. The only important argument for im- 
mortahty is confidence in the nature of God. 
There is no scientific demonstration of life 
beyond the grave which as yet commands 
any respectable measure of assent. Members 
of societies for psychical research have, in- 
deed, reported to us strange and interesting 
experiences which seem to imply continued 
existence after this life. The hints, however, 
are at best only tantalizing. They do not 



126 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

carry conviction except to those who are 
bound to hold them as convincing. The 
arguments for immortaHty based on such 
analogies as that of the conservation of 
energy do not get us far. There is no 
weighty argument except our conviction as 
to the character of God. It is possible that 
the hfe of each one of us will cease at the 
grave. But we refuse to beheve this, not so 
much because of our regard for ourselves, as 
because of our regard for God. Many wise 
philosophers have pronounced man's beHef 
in his own immortality a mark of his over- 
whelming egotism. But that is not fair, 
especially when we see the most humble of 
men holding fast to the behef in their own 
immortality. The reason is instead an un- 
willingness to beheve in an irresponsible 
God or an irresponsible universe. To call 
souls into an existence hmited by the span 
of the human life would be the grimmest of 
mockeries and ironies, assuming that the 
world is ruled by an Intelhgence. To call 
souls into existence to begin and carry 
through with them a never-ending friend- 
ship which would lead to ever -increasing hfe 
would be altogether worth while. 



THE DIVINE FRIENDSHIP 127 

If we are to think of immortality at all, 
we must put side by side with communion 
with God communion with the lives for 
w^hom we work together with God. There 
seems to be with many people a shying off 
from immortality as carrying with it a con- 
sciousness of personal identity or as imply- 
ing a possibility of continuance of friend- 
ships begun on earth. If there is no con- 
sciousness of personal identity, immortality 
is worthless ; and if there is no possibihty of 
the continuance of friendships begun in this 
life, immortality ceases to be altogether 
desirable. It seems meaningless to say that 
the lives for whom we have wrought here in 
companionship with God are not to be bound 
to us by some social ties forever. The 
modern popular sentiment makes more and 
more of social fellowships. There is no 
reason why these social bonds may not be 
valued, next to communion with the Divine, 
as the most important feature of eternal 
existence. 

Beyond our belief in the inherent virtue of 
communion with God and communion with 
our friends it is not well for us to go in our 
theories of another life. Of course there is 



128 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

a legitimate sphere here for the exercise of 
the imagination, but the picturings of im- 
agination are meager in their content. We 
beheve that we shall be with God and with 
men: this is enough. We would much bet- 
ter pull our thought away from the attempt 
to imagine heaven hereafter and fasten it 
upon the task of creating heaven on earth. 
There is not much justice in the claim that 
popular sentiment is in protest against the 
spirit of other-worldliness, but it is in protest 
against an overemphasis on other-worldliness 
— an overemphasis which dreams about 
heaven to the neglect of earth. But, on the 
other hand, we shall quite likely make the 
most of the affairs of earth only as we hold 
fast to a belief in communion with God and 
men strong enough to endure the shock of 
physical death. 



CHAPTER VII 

PROVISION FOR RESCUE 

In any scheme for the training and en- 
largement of free hves place must be found 
for the correction of mistakes. The power 
to choose the good implies the power to 
choose the evil, and the choice of evil by a 
human life makes demand at once upon the 
corrective resources of the divine hfe. We 
have all along said that we cannot be satis- 
fied with anything but a responsible God. 
If the human will makes mistakes, heavy re- 
sponsibility presses upon the Creator for the 
correction of the mistakes and the direction 
of the will back to the choice of the good. 
Any Creator who would put into a world 
like ours a race of free beings would be under 
obligation to help them gain their feet after 
stumbling. We recur here to our oft-stated 
contention that while we are free none of us 
asked for freedom. We are responsible for 
the moral use of freedom, but ours is not the 
only responsibihty. He who made us free 

129 



130 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

bears a heavier load than we. Christian 
consciousness has in all ages recognized this 
responsibility on the part of the Creator. 
Every age of theological thinking has said in 
its own phrases that God has done and is 
doing everything in his power to help men 
out of their mistakes. 

It is true that the Christian leaders usu- 
ally state this truth as if God were per- 
forming this restorative work out of an 
affection for men which has not concerned 
itself much with the divine responsibih- 
ties for restoration. God is indeed love, 
but the quality of love always depends 
upon the quahty of the loving Hfe, and the 
life of God must be fundamentally moral in 
his devotion to the full discharge of respon- 
sibihty incurred in the creation of men. 
Oftentimes, in om- hymnology especially, we 
glorify God as if his rescue of men were a 
work which he could have undertaken or not, 
just as he pleased. We sing, if we do not 
say, that God could have left us to perish if 
it had not been for his great love for us. 
God might indeed have left us to perish, but 
if he had done so, he would not have been 
the God of our Christian Scriptures. Not 



PROVISION FOR RESCUE 131 

a soul in the universe must be lost until 
every ounce of the divine recuperative power 
has been exhausted. In the presence of the 
fateful weight of human freedom we must 
not say that every soul will ultimately be 
saved, because this might imply that some 
souls would have to lose their freedom. We 
cannot think of the kingdom of God as made 
up of lives who are compelled to be righteous. 
Righteousness in the true moral meaning is 
not possible on such a basis. What would 
any sort of heaven be like if it had in it any 
persons who were there because they were 
compelled to be there and who were always 
secretly hankering for a chance to shp out 
through the pearly gates? To mean any- 
thing heaven must be an association of lives 
exulting in the freest play of faculties. On 
the other hand, however, we repeat that the 
responsibihty of the Creator is not dis- 
charged as long as there is a lost soul any- 
where in the universe who can by any means 
be persuaded to turn to the light of freedom. 
A responsible God has not done enough 
until he has done all. 

The first remedy which occurs to the ordi- 
nary mind with which to meet the mistakes 



132 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

of freedom is punishment. In studying 
God's punishment of men we may well take 
account of some of the advances of modern 
humanitarianism which are rapidly modify- 
ing our whole method of treating offenders. 
There is a sound moral instinct back of the 
current demand that even hardened crim- 
inals shall not be given "cruel and unusual" 
punishment. No matter how much of a 
transgressor an individual may be, regard is 
due what may be called his essential hu- 
manity. That is to say, the very fact that 
he is a man makes it impossible for us to deal 
with him as anything other than a man. In 
our criminal courts we feel that it is neces- 
sary now and again to pass sentence of death 
upon an offender. But even in such ex- 
tremity pubhc opinion in any rational or 
humane community would be horrified at 
the recommendation of torture or of dis- 
honor to the body after hfe had departed. 
In earher days men imported into their ex- 
positions of God's dealing with the world 
their own punitive barbarism in dealing with 
one another. An age which could beheve 
that a peasant should be killed for stealing a 
rich man's rabbit could also believe that a 



PROVISION FOR RESCUE 133 

sinner could be sent to an eternal hell for a 
minor offense against the dignity of the 
Creator. 

We have broken away from this, how- 
ever, and are advocating the humaniza- 
tion of pmiishment. That is to say, we are 
ordering that in punishment men must be 
treated as men, and if possible be brought to 
the state where they are more human after 
the punishment than before. A society 
which would inflict inhuman punishment 
would become more and more inhuman it- 
self. Macaulay made an oft-quoted remark 
to the effect that the Puritans forbade bear- 
baiting not because it gave pain to the bear 
but because it gave pleasure to the spec- 
tators. As has been often said, if this was the 
motive of the Puritan, he was possessed of 
sound moral sense. Nothing but harm can 
come to a community which can take dehght 
in or passively acquiesce in the suffering 
even of dumb animals. Much more is this 
true when the distress of human beings is 
involved. Whatever the form of punish- 
ment that God metes out to men the punish- 
ment must aim at their enlargement and im- 
provement. A Methodist theologian once 



134 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

arguing thus was rebuked by a sturdy eccle- 
siastic who noisily informed him that such 
doctrine would loosen the moral foundations 
by making hell tolerable. The theologian's 
appropriate reply was that he was not espe- 
cially concerned about a tolerable hell, but 
he was very much concerned about a toler- 
able God. 

Of course all this will be met by the famil- 
iar outcry about justice for justice's own 
sake — the divine justice must be vindicated 
on its own account. To which we most 
heartily subscribe; but we do maintain that 
the pubhc opinion of a sanctified universe 
will not tolerate a vindication of justice 
without regard for the effect of that vindica- 
tion upon the truest human interests. Every 
healthy moral intelhgence must feel that if 
a free will dehberately chooses the lower 
coin^ses, it should be allowed to pass into an 
environment and state appropriate to itself. 
But the same moral intelhgence must stal- 
wartly decree that the primary aim of pun- 
ishment is to be remedial and corrective. 
Which is the better vindication of divine 
justice, the spectacle of all the furies let 
loose upon a soul, or the spectacle of a soul 



PROVISION FOR RESCUE 135 

brought back to free companionship with 
the Divine? Some man will, no doubt, say- 
that the punishment of sin should be the 
ringing of a loud alarm bell of warning to an 
imperiled community. We submit that bells 
are not edifying if they give forth just a 
promiscuous clamor. Alarm bells do not 
get at the cause of fires. All talk about 
punishments inherently fitting misses the 
point unless it shows us how to prevent and 
cure. There is no desire here to make law- 
breaking easy, nor to coddle sinners, nor to 
allow transgressors to fancy that sin is a 
trifling incident which can be easily over- 
looked. If we are to live in a universe of law 
at all, an evil seed, unless rooted out, must 
grow to an evil harvest. There is a question 
whether one who has misused his freedom can 
ever be the same as if he had not misused 
that freedom. The universe must have 
moral principles woven into its inmost con- 
stitution. But we are asking the question 
simply as to how best to get a free man who 
has started on the wrong track back upon 
the right track, and all this with a minimum 
of loss to everybody concerned. It has been 
wisely observed that Christianity is the one 



136 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

religion which does not believe in throwing 
anything away. It cleanses and transforms 
and lifts out of the crooked path and puts 
upon the straight path. Its aim is the salva- 
tion which Jesus had in mind in the promise 
of more abundant life. It would be a trav- 
esty upon the purpose of the author of all 
freedom if the saved soul were less in its 
powers of free life after salvation than 
before. 

The problem is to find how to treat a free 
life which has made a bunghng use of free- 
dom. The difficulty is increased by the 
tendency of every misuse of freedom to in- 
volve a measure of loss of freedom itself. 
The formation of an evil habit, for example, 
means that the free fife is passing down from 
selfhood into a state somewhat resembling 
thinghood. The extent of the demands 
upon the divine grace appears in that with 
every sin of a free agent less is left upon 
which the divine power can work. We must 
always keep in mind too the kind of power 
which that divine force must use. It must 
be the power of persuasion and appeal. 
Among such appeals would be the revelation 
of the cost of a wrong choice to the man him- 



\ 



PROVISION FOR RESCUE 137 

self, and to others, and to the universe, and 
to God, and the revelation of the worth of 
spiritual values in themselves. If men will 
not yield to the persuasiveness of the appeal 
to them as rational and self-determining to 
lay hold on the higher life for the worth of 
that life in itself, it is hard to see what call 
will stir them; that is to say — a call worthy 
of the Kingdom of Heaven. There is a 
forceful pertinence here in the parable of 
the rich man and Lazarus. As the grim 
picture draws to its close the rich man cries 
out asking that Lazarus be sent back to the 
rich man's brothers. The terrible reply is 
that the brothers have Moses and the 
prophets; if they will not hear them, they 
will not listen though one should rise from 
the dead — the meaning obviously being that 
if the way of hfe set forth by Moses and the 
prophets does not of itself appeal, no spec- 
tacular marvel will be at all relevant. Of 
course, if the brothers of the rich man had 
seen Lazarus coming back to tell them that 
their brother was in the place of torment, 
they might have been scared lest they too 
come to torment. But the spiritual accept- 
ance of Moses and the prophets would 



138 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

hardly follow an attempt to make a selfish 
insurance against pain. 

The world to-day has more than Moses 
and the prophets. It has the revelation of 
the life in Christ Jesus which bears witness 
to itself as the life of God. The aim of all 
religious teaching should be to make that Hf e 
winsome and attractive on its own account, 
so attractive that men will of their own free 
choice accept it and follow it gladly. In the 
hght of such hfe real sorrow for sin should 
take on a positive loathing for all evil ways. 
Forgiveness sought for in the name of Christ 
can mean only that the seeker is making a 
passionate attempt to turn from the evil way 
and walk in the way of life. 
v/ In what form must the sincere change to 
the new life show itself? Here, again, we do 
well to listen to the modern demands made 
upon Christian teaching. Current thought 
has no objections to a church's maintaining 
that the salvation of a life reveals itself in 
devotion to the Word, but insists that such 
devotion must in turn reveal itself in the hfe 
of service. Again, popular sentiment will 
sanction the preaching of salvation as the 
attainment of a vivid and satisfying inner 



PROVISION FOR RESCUE 139 

experience, but will insist that the warm 
emotional glow must shine forth into the do- 
ing of good. If still another churchman 
maintains that the saved life is the life upon 
whom the church pours her cleansing powers 
in the sacraments, the plain people are right 
in their insistence that such sacramental 
efScacy must prove itself in the determina- 
tion to help and uphft mankind. 

Restoration and salvation must be 
preached in terms of the largest welfare. 
The tendency of present-day social phil- 
osophy is to judge all manner of institutions 
by their results on human life. If an in- 
dustrial system produces enormous quanti- 
ties of material goods, but does so at a waste 
of human goods, the industrial system 
stands condemned. The economic theory 
which justifies such a result may be orthodox 
enough, but the orthodoxy must fall before 
the insistent human demands. We apply 
the same human tests to educational systems. 
There are those in every period of the 
world's life who maintain that an educa- 
tional system is a thing by itself to which the 
intellects of successive generations of pupils 
must be fitted. For long it required some 



140 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

courage to ask what we meant by education. 
And the doctrine that education consists in 
drawing out of a mind whatever may be 
within of possibihty has again and again 
been frowned upon as a heresy. More and 
more, however, we are testing our educa- 
tional organizations by the question as to 
what happens to the pupils who attend 
school. By that question the system stands 
or falls. An intelligent public opinion insists 
that the educational machinery be so read- 
justed or reformed as to produce the best 
human result in those upon whom the ma- 
chinery is brought to bear. If modern 
society is to command that the years between 
closing infancy and opening maturity are to 
be spent in the process of education, that 
society has a duty to command also that 
the human outcome be worth the expendi- 
ture of money and effort. 

It may seem hke a long cry from such dis- 
cussion to the Christian salvation. The 
same tests, however, surely will be brought 
to bear upon the methods of salvation. If 
the saving process does not draw out of hu- 
man hfe the latent moral and spiritual 
possibiHties, it has failed. If it can be 



PROVISION FOR RESCUE 141 

truthfully said that a man is less of a man 
after becoming a Christian than before, the 
Christianity which has been at work upon 
him has failed. We repeat that Christianity 
is the religion which will not throw anything 
away. Its true aim is to hf t everything that 
is good up to its highest power. Christianity 
never must be identified with any repression, 
except that repression which would close the 
life current off from the lower channel for 
the sake of its flowing at the higher level. 
There is room in the kingdom of God for the 
utmost variety and diversity. All purpose 
of leveling persons to one standard or idea 
or method of expression is abhorrent to any 
Christianity that understands itself. We 
guard ourselves against false emphasis here 
by reminding ourselves that this variety is 
not to be sought by making our own souls 
ends in themselves. The varieties and di- 
versities are to come to hght in the service of 
the common good, or in the pursuit of the 
ideals of the good and the true and the 
beautiful, which are to be made as far as 
possible the common property of all. 

It is unfortunately possible so to phrase 
the above doctrine as to justify all manner 



142 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

of selfishness under the claim of the search 
for the fullest life. The seeker for pleasure 
as such might claim to be in pursuit of larger 
life. Common sense, however, banishes all 
this and at least sketches out the central 
ideals which the saved hfe must cherish. It 
always identifies goodness with service, or, 
as the trite proverb has it, goodness must 
be good for something. The purity which 
results from moral asepsis or sterilization 
against every possible contamination does 
not commend itself to the mass of mankind. 
The people who must withdraw from the 
ordinary round and the common task in 
order to be good are most often those whom 
we are perfectly willing to have thus with- 
draw. But for any large number of persons 
to do this strikes the plain man as an aberra- 
tion. The Middle Ages spectacle of thou- 
sands of persons swarming out into the 
deserts and living in trees and dens in the 
earth in order to be saved raises the pertinent 
question as to whether such persons would 
not better have remained lost, for in the lost 
estate they were at least living measurably 
normal human Hves; and in their desert re- 
treats they became soon so abnormal as to 



PROVISION FOR RESCUE 143 

make their type of Christianity a parody 
and travesty. Many of them speedily be- 
came too dirty to suggest saintHness; and 
those who hved as hermits got so far out of 
touch with ordinary human duties as to 
make whatever spiritual revelations they re- 
ceived of value only to themselves. We 
have no desire to be cynical in our character- 
ization of such repressive Christianity. All 
we wish to say is that such experience cannot 
be fitted in with the Christian definition of 
religion as the quest of abundant hfe. 

If we are to hit upon a description of sal- 
vation which meets the demands of enlight- 
ened social thinking, we shall have to find 
something between wild and riotous self- 
assertion on the one hand and a blocking or 
damming up of the forces of the spirit on the 
other hand. The modern interpretation of 
control gives us a good hint as to noble con- 
tent in Christian salvation. The mastery of 
material nature has come not as man has un- 
loosed the terrific powers of the universe to 
let them run wild, nor as he has sought to 
pen them in to a tightly inclosed impotence. 
The superiority of man over nature is shown 
in the control of the forces of nature. To 



144 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

take a commonplace illustration, almost 
everything that we use in life has upon it the 
touch of fire. The instruments which we use 
were shaped in fire. The food upon our 
tables has been cooked by fire. An artificial 
temperate zone has been carried far into the 
snows of the north by the use of fire. If we 
could imagine fire as first revealed to the 
human race in the sweep of some fearful 
conflagration started by a stroke of hght- 
ning, let us say, we might imagine that the 
first human observers would conclude that 
their sole duty toward fire was to strive to 
quench it with the last ounce of their 
strength. Some forces need to be quenched 
of course. But the proper and effective 
control of fire makes possible almost every- 
thing that is worth while in our modern 
material civihzation. 

So also in the spiritual realm. What a 
mockery to speak of self-control as if it 
merely meant the keeping of one's self from 
doing something! Here is a man of fiery 
temper. He has the impulse to break forth 
into violent speech at intense provocation; 
he keeps silent, and we praise him for his 
strength of self-control. If that is all, very 



PROVISION FOR RESCUE 145 

possibly this fiery individual will go on 
through life burning himself out on the 
inside. Between wrathful speech and dead 
silence there must be some middle ground. 
Our ordinary speech suffers from the lack 
of fire. The self -controlled man, after all, 
is the one who lets the fire play out into con- 
trolled utterance for a worthy purpose. So 
with other phases of mental strength. Per- 
haps the advance of civilization depends as 
much upon the dynamic imagination as upon 
any other single mental faculty. Between 
the imagination which runs riot in fantastic 
and crazy nonsense and the dry-as-dust in- 
tellectual plodding which has made gray 
every coloring of imagination there should 
be some middle course. We find that middle 
course in that union of imagination with fact 
by which the peering mind starts with fact, 
leaps from fact to a world as yet uncreated, 
and then compels that imagined world to 
stand fast among facts in concrete realiza- 
tion. It is in such quarters that we must 
seek for the substance of the highest free- 
dom. If our religion is anything to us, it is 
the liberty of the sons of God, and the liberty 
of the sons of God is not wholly an existence 



146 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

within fenced inclosures. There is a touch 
of life-giving significance in the Scripture 
that speaks of Jesus as a door. "By me," 
Jesus said, ''men shall go in and out and 
find pasture." The notion of Christian hfe 
which makes it consist in going into some- 
thing is but half of the truth. The other 
half consists in the going out into ampler 
and greener pastures for the sake of larger 
hfe. 

A traveler from a country of fences once 
asked a sheep raiser in a fenceless land if it 
was not bad to have sheep running over an 
unf enced plain. The reply was quite worth 
heeding even for tasks beyond sheep -rais- 
ing: "There is no need of a fence if the sheep 
have a shepherd." Saint Paul once thanked 
God that neither death nor life could sepa- 
rate him from the love of God in Christ Jesus. 
It is indeed a satisfaction that death cannot 
separate us from God, but it is even more of 
a satisfaction that hfe cannot thus separate 
us. We shall not arrive unto Christian 
Christianity until we think of it as ever open- 
ing out into fresher fields. Forms of state- 
ment and of ritual and of organization may 
be left behind, but Christianity in its inner 



PROVISION FOR RESCUE 147 

genius is the religion of advancing freedom 
— only, the freedom must be the control 
of spiritual forces for a human and divine 
result. 

We know there will be some who wiU 
shrink from the word ''control" in describing 
freedom. But such protest is verbal and silly. 
It is through the control of individual and 
social forces that there arise those blessings 
which mean the progressive Hberation of 
mankind. Some criticism here is about as 
reasonable as if one should say, ''If I am to 
use fire, I shall have to observe the laws of 
fire ; I shall have to submit to bondage in my 
observance of those laws ; I shall be hemmed 
about by precautions to which I shall be a 
slave." It is possible for a man to talk 
thus; but which leads to the more blessed 
freedom, to give oneself to the use of laws 
which supply one with a warm house and 
cooked food, or to sit out in the cold and 
gnaw raw meat? Much objection to the 
doctrine of control in the spiritual Kingdom 
shows the marks of rather serious mental 
handicap in the objector. 

And now arises once more the objector 
who repeats that by its very nature salvation 



148 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

has to do more with sin than with hf e. We 
yield to no one in our insistence upon the 
disturbing nature of sin and its awful de- 
structiveness in a world hke ours. We de- 
mand that penitence be thoroughgoing to 
the last inch; especially if the bad deeds of 
a transgressor have wrought bad results in 
the hves of others is the penitent under 
obhgation to travel to the utmost to right the 
wrongs of which he himself has been the 
cause. We cannot tolerate easy-going peni- 
tence. If a sinner forgiven upon his death- 
bed should wake and find himself in para- 
dise, and then should realize that his sins had 
sent others to perdition, we would expect 
him not to rest in paradise imtil he had tried 
every door to get into perdition for the rehef 
of those whom he had wronged. Penitence 
must be taken seriously; but having said 
this, we must still avow that after every 
effort to make amends for a wrong Hf e the 
genuine penitence shows itself by its for- 
ward-looking positive devotion to the right 
hfe, in a desire to work with God and men 
to bring all souls everywhere out to spiritual 
freedom. 

There are goods which all can share to- 



PROVISION FOR RESCUE 149 

gether without making anyone poor. Food 
and clothes and houses can be shared only 
within limits, but right deeds and deep 
insights and fine feehng can be communi- 
cated to others without making the giver 
poor. Perhaps as satisfactory a picture of 
the kingdom of heaven as any is this hint of 
a state where the righteous man's loyalty to 
a lofty ideal and the seer's thrill at profound 
truth and the response of the lover of beauty 
to the stirring source of all beauty, are com- 
municated to a great society of saved and 
transformed lives without impoverishing the 
givers, but with the enrichment of all in a 
common rejoicing. 

May we pause to say that the salvation of 
the stumbhng can never again be thought of 
as just as an individual adjustment between 
the erring and the Creator. At the center 
there must be such adjustment, but the re- 
sponsibihty for stumbling is not altogether 
individual but also social. A man may 
stumble because he is heedless or slovenly in 
his walk. He may stumble also because the 
path is full of pitfalls. Keeping roads in 
good repair is altogether a social responsi- 
bility. Some travelers will fall on the best 



150 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

road, but the surest preventive against 
stumbling is a good road. The social respon- 
sibihty for sin must find place in any mes- 
sage of rescue. 



PART II 
SOME STEADYING FACTORS 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE INDIVIDUAL 

In the first part of this book we have con- 
sidered the influence of pubHc opinion on 
some fundamental theological conceptions. 
While we have used the term "pubhc 
opinion" somewhat loosely, we have meant 
the opinion of an important social group at 
a given time, as, for example, the opinion of 
the United States in the year 1920, as that 
has reached a settled deposit of conviction 
after the action of the longer period forces 
— or after the fruit of the social mind has 
matured and ripened. But it would be 
a mistake always to identify the call of a 
social group at any one moment with 
the vital and essential demands of man- 
kind. Even if we define mankind as an 
organism, we must not judge the sentiment 
of that organism just at any one day, or 
even through any brief period, as necessarily 
comprehending all or much that is valuable. 
In this part of our essay we wish to discuss 

153 



154 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

the Kmitations placed upon opinion at any- 
one crisis by fundamental factors which any- 
single day may be inclined to overlook or 
to override. There are elements in human 
society — especially when the problem of the 
divine is up for discussion — which have a 
pecuHar claim to be heard. Through some 
of these factors we are accustomed to say 
that the divine makes signally convincing 
revelations. It will be clear, of course, that 
we hold that a sentiment of a given instant 
may be the voice of God — an instantaneous, 
irresistible outburst of popular wrath at a 
great evil is most suggestive of the divine 
presence — but there are other voices which 
may correct and supplement the voice of 
any one day. 

First, we look at the qualification which 
must be brought to the popular utterance of 
a moment by the word of the man who sees 
facts exactly as they are, without any regard 
to whether those facts may be agreeable to 
pubhc sentiment or disagreeable. Matters 
of fact cannot always be determined by 
popular vote — or be ruled out by popular 
vote. If a fact is a fact, it is what it is, and 
no overwhelming majority against it can 



THE INDIVIDUAL 155 

make it other than a fact. Of course we 
must not forget that even as we look upon 
facts much depends upon the seeing eye, or 
the atmosphere through which that eye 
looks. Expectations often determine our 
vision to quite an unsuspected degree. The 
man who sees is the man who is looking for 
something, not the man who is just staring 
about. The very tension of looking for 
something definite may lead us to think we 
see that something when we do not. It is 
entirely true that the force of expectancy in 
discovery has not been scientifically thought 
through, and that the significance of expect- 
ancy for error has not been given due 
weight. Moreover, an expert may become 
so overspecialized as to see facts out of all 
perspective, so that his report is just as 
erroneous as if he announced something that 
he did not see. Making allowance, however, 
for possibiHty of error, we must all stand by 
the plain common sense that the man who 
has the fact has the right to rise up against 
the opinion of any multitude, no matter how 
great — if that multitude does not have the 
fact. 

All of this has been profusely illustrated 



156 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

in the final victories of the scientists who 
have proclaimed truths which have at first 
run counter to popular notions. The 
proposition that the world is round was at 
one time very unpopular. All the teaching 
of past generations had accustomed men 
to an entirely opposite view. Now, it was 
possible to shout down the man who held a 
theory of the rotundity of the earth, but it 
was not possible to make the shouting very 
effective after men began to circumnavigate 
the globe. So with all scientific announce- 
ments that have had basis in fact. In some 
countries where typhus prevails it would be 
hard to get public opinion to sanction the 
scientific verdict that the body louse carries 
the disease germ. But popular feeling 
cannot set aside the revelation of the culture 
tube — even if we smash the tube. 

All public opinion has to stay within 
the limits set by fact. In this connection 
it may be well to recall the words of 
Abraham Lincoln, whose devotion to the 
people no one will doubt. Mr. Lincoln 
was once feeling after the facts in a situa- 
tion where public opinion seemed to have 
prejudged the circumstances. Mr. Lincoln 



THE INDIVIDUAL 157 

said that he must have the facts, that 
if he did not have the facts, ten thousand 
angels swearing that he was right when 
he was wrong would not save him from the 
calamity of having decided against the facts. 
However it may be with angels, we must all 
remind ourselves, especially in theology, 
that popular majorities do not avail against 
facts, so that we must not expect the scien- 
tists who tell us how God works in nature, 
or the historians who tell us how he has 
worked through the church, or the biblical 
students who reveal to us the process by 
which the Scriptures have been given us, to 
submit their findings to the vote of the 
people. The people can, indeed, accept or 
reject, but the facts are what they are. 

It may be well for us to hold all this be- 
fore us as we Hsten to those who testify as 
to matter of fact in religious experience. 
Most of our theology must build upon re- 
ligious experience. And the religious 
experience must be the experience of some 
person or persons. In this domain we must 
not make too speedy appeal to what we are 
pleased to call the ''common-to-all." There 
are explorers and discoverers in the sphere 



158 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

of religious experience as well as in the 
sphere of the physical and material. Noth- 
ing could be more fatal to the progress of 
religion than to rule out the testimony of 
those who have extraordinary spiritual ex- 
periences. All such experiences must in- 
deed be subjected to most exacting scrutiny 
to determine whether they are supernormal 
or merely abnormal. But the scrutiny is 
not necessarily the scrutiny of a crowd. It 
is difficult indeed in inner experiences to get 
at the psychological data apart from the ex- 
periencer's interpretation. But if an indi- 
vidual has in a spiritual crisis passed out of 
despair into triumph, or if he has by spir- 
itual struggle risen from selfishness to un- 
selfishness, or if he has through his faith torn 
loose from the clutches of an evil habit — all 
this belongs to the domain of fact and be- 
stows upon him who has passed through the 
crisis authority to speak in the name of the 
experience itself. 

Even the most naturalistic psychologists 
of our day concede the basis of spiritual 
fact in the phenomena of conversion, and 
of uplift through prayer, and of the cleans- 
ing and purifying power of faith. Men 



THE INDIVIDUAL 159 

who speak and act out of such experi- 
ences are not to be pushed to one side 
by a transient popular current. Suppose, 
for illustration, we had a group of men of 
thousands, or scores of thousands, all pursu- 
ing their own selfish purposes. Suppose 
one of these men by that turning about 
which we call conversion should break away 
from selfishness to unselfishness, the ma- 
jority would be overwhelmingly against 
him. But who would be in possession of the 
more consequential fact, the man who had 
found the path to unselfishness or the thou- 
sands who were still in selfishness? To be 
sure, we have various devices by which we 
meet questions hke this when we are un- 
comfortably confronted by them. We say 
that in the long run pubhc opinion will right 
itself and vote for the man who has the facts. 
It is just the tendency, however, of pubhc 
opinion so often to act after a short run, or 
no run at all, to which we are calhng 
attention. 

We must warn again against the fallacy 
in the dictum that truth is truth no matter 
who says it. Truth in some utterance is just 
a lucky guess. Rehgious truths mean noth- 



160 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

ing on the lips of some men and everything 
on the hps of others. Truth about religion, 
uttered by a saint after years of saintly liv- 
ing, is more authoritative than the utterance 
of multitudes which care not for religion. 
The fact in this case is the life and char- 
acter of the saint himself. The votes of 
the sinners cannot outweigh the revelations 
of the saints. 

Another man is to be reckoned with in 
our estimate of the factors which must sup- 
plement and correct a popular opinion. We 
refer to the genuine conservative. Or, if 
you please, the man who holds fast to the 
values of the past. We must recognize the 
proneness of pubhc opinion to rise and fall 
in rhythm. The opinions of an individual 
are subject to an ebb and flow dependent 
upon scores of modifying agencies, such as 
states of bodily health, or the variations of 
temperament or mood, or the changes of en- 
vironment. Man does not Hve on a straight 
line, but on a curve which ascends to a peak, 
then descends, and after a little ascends 
again. Even the rhythm is not at all regular 
and the curve cannot be plotted with any 
exactness. Who of us can tell just when he 



THE INDIVIDUAL 161 

is to be grave and when gay? Who of us 
can teU when the mood of faith is to yield to 
the mood of despair? As it is with the in- 
dividual so it is with groups. The tides rise 
and fall, or the gusts blow upon society and 
for a while raise waves which seem to be 
tidal in their sweep and size. It is easy in 
such circumstances even for a professed 
leader to feel that the group has been borne 
away from its past and even to rejoice in 
such progress. If, now, we define the con- 
servative as the man who is not thus caught 
in the flow, but who holds fast to the good 
which has been tried out, we must see in him 
a divine correcting influence sent to an un- 
steady world. The conservative who holds 
to the past just because it is past is not en- 
titled to any great honor. He may be chron- 
ically unable to let go, and his conservatism 
may be pathological. The conservative, on 
the other hand, who holds to the past because 
he thoroughly understands that past, and 
knows the value of the lessons of a former 
day for the present, is not to be despised. 
Here we must be on our guard against the 
illusion that the majority can decide. How 
many votes would it have taken in the later 



162 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

and more empty days of Greek philosophy 
to have decided that Plato and Aristotle 
were to be dethroned from intellectual king- 
ship? 

We have spoken of a law of rhythm which 
seems to govern the spirit of the masses. It 
is significant that the leaders who have been 
most eager for the final welfare of mankind 
have, most of them, been distrustful of the 
opinion of huge groups at any one instant, 
where the opinion has not seemed to rest upon 
solid processes of reasoning. Karl Marx, 
for example, whose loyalty to the common 
welfare we cannot doubt, whether we accept 
his theories or not, had a dread of popularity 
amounting almost to an obsession. What 
he feared, of course, was that by heeding the 
voice of the people at any one moment he 
might be carried away from the moorings to 
which his thought was anchored. He had 
before him this likehhood of popular opinion 
to the up-and-downness of a wavehke 
rhythm. This does not mean that popular 
thought does not in the main and through a 
long period substantially advance. The ad- 
vance, however, is somewhat hke the rising 
of a sea in which the highest wave means the 



THE INDIVIDUAL 163 

deepest hollow between the waves, or like 
the march of the seasons, which does not pre- 
vent a planet which is moving toward smn- 
mer from lapsing back for an occasional day 
toward the winter. And at times the phght 
of public opinion is much worse than these 
analogies suggest. It is as if the whole tide 
went astray or the planet got out of its 
orbit. The tragedy is that at times this 
abnormahty is made appalling by propa- 
ganda carried on by powerful agents in so- 
ciety. 

We must discriminate, then, between the 
different classes of conservatives. There is, 
as we have said, the conservative who holds 
fast to everything because he has been hold- 
ing fast to it, or because of the sheer power 
of constitutional inertia. With all such 
conservatism we must justly be impatient. 
The other conservatism, however — the con- 
servatism of long famiharity with what is 
best in the past, the conservatism which, 
slightly altering our figure, has yielded itself 
to the main currents in human history — 
resolutely refuses to be pulled out of those 
main channels into any eddy, no matter how 
apparently irresistible. Or we may think 



164 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

of a worthy conservatism as somewhat like 
that slowness of the tiller of the soil which 
to the impatient social radical is sheer dull- 
wittedness — the slowness which really comes 
out of deahng with an earth which works 
according to fixed laws and which steadily 
refuses to bring forth soimd harvests from 
unsound seed. 

It is interesting to note in the study 
of social progress the frequency with which 
innovators and reformers protest that they 
are not announcing any new doctrine. 
They proclaim a return to something that 
has been lost sight of. The Old Testament 
is the record of the prolonged struggle to 
keep the gaze of the chosen people fastened 
on the elementary justice which had pre- 
vailed among the Hebrews in primitive 
days. These were days when the Canaanite 
worship was the new and popular thing — 
or the Phoenician or Babylonian. Against 
all this the true leaders put the elements of 
justice learned before the Jews ever reached 
the Promised Land. Even against Jesus 
the charge has been sometimes brought 
that he did not announce anything alto- 
gether new. Critics of Jesus have main- 



THE INDIVIDUAL 165 

tained that everything which he said could in 
substance, if not in form, be found in the Old 
Testament. There is thus occasional de- 
bate as to the originahty of the Founder of 
Christianity. So far as the mere saying of 
things is concerned, the Old Testament 
prophets and seers had said the things which 
Jesus proclaimed. All this, however, is 
more a tribute to Jesus than a reflection 
upon him. Jesus did not claim to be a pub- 
lisher of new things. From his point of 
view the chui'ch of his day had passed far 
away from the majesty of the prophetic eras 
of the Jewish nation. In steeping himself 
in the messages of his predecessors so deeply 
that their phrases came often to his lips 
Jesus prepared himself for the attempt to 
draw his people back to the landmarks which 
they had forgotten. Of course the orig- 
inahty of Jesus must be, in a comprehensive 
treatment, approached from another view- 
point altogether than that of the extent of 
his dependence on the prophets. But we 
are insisting now that the mere fact that one 
aspect of the teaching of Jesus looks to the 
past does not take from the value of that 
teaching. 



166 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

Many a reformer is at bottom a preacher 
of repentance. Repent ye, for the kingdom 
is at hand. Turn out of the path to one side 
or the other, or turn squarely around for the 
sake of looking again upon a forgotten 
truth. This is quite often the message of 
him who seems to be the proclaimer of a new 
day. Such a man cannot be outvoted by the 
expression of the feehng of the masses to 
whom he speaks. The man who sees the im- 
portant continuities of human existence can- 
not be shouted down forever. He recog- 
nizes within himself the push of the currents 
which flow out of the long ages of the past. 
Sooner or later these currents will get into 
their true channel. A conservative of this 
type must be heeded above all the clamor of 
his day. 

We must never forget that men are not 
just so many separate, independent units. 
They are parts and organs of the social 
body. By some men more than by others 
the social body is bound to a past which can- 
not be ignored. No amount of voting by a 
social body can make that body's past other 
than it is. As well might an individual an- 
nounce that by his own vote he would decree 



I 



THE INDIVIDUAL 167 

who his ancestors were — ^making a choice by 
his own wishes. The decree might be ac- 
quiesced in by the ancestor-chooser's neigh- 
bors, but would not affect the working of the 
laws of heredity. 

Just as there are men who gather up 
within themselves the streams from the past, 
so there are others who sense beforehand the 
idea or the sentiment for which the future is 
to call. Now, there is no supreme virtue in 
just being ahead of one's time. One may be 
so far ahead of one's time as to be utterly 
useless to one's companions. If it had been 
possible, for example, to give a seer of one 
thousand years ago a ghmpse of the marvels 
of our steam and electricity without showing 
him the intervening steps leading up to such 
discovery, the seer might not have been of 
much value to his contemporaries. His at- 
tention might have been so distracted by 
pictures of the far-off future as to render 
him impatient with horse power and water 
power. There is an altogether different 
manner, however, in which men can be ahead 
of their time. We have spoken of a life 
through which the currents of the past run 
strongly. It is possible for such a man. 



168 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

whom we may think of as conservative, to 
catch ghmpses of the com-se of the stream 
in the f utm-e, or to see where various streams 
are drawing together or where they are to 
find a pass through a mountain of diffi- 
culties. Such men are not to be silenced by 
the multitude. They are not to be shouted 
down. As popular thinking comes to sound 
understanding it will discern that such 
spirits are the fine instruments by which the 
future reveals itself. 

Recurring again to the figure of the so- 
cial body, the man with a sense for the fu- 
ture is like those finer, more subtle powers 
of the body which enable it to detect good 
or ill afar off — something hke the keenness 
of an eagle's eye, for example. We some- 
times think such prophets are seeing visions 
or hearing unearthly voices. But the \asions 
of their to-day may be facts with which we 
may have to deal to-morrow. And the voices 
which they hear in the upper air may be the 
speech of the street day after to-morrow. 

In addition to the men of the past and the 
men of the future, there are also others 
whom the popular movements must not cast 
aside. There are the men who, as we say, 



THE INDIVIDUAL 169 

stand for the eternal in the midst of time. 
We must be careful indeed to guard our- 
selves against the temptation to set up a 
scheme of absolutes utterly changeless 
through all times. Except in the formal 
sense there is no such system of absolutes. 
In the moral realm the absolute is the abso- 
lute determination to do right under all 
circumstances. What the right is, however, 
at a given instant, must be determined by 
considerations relative to time and place and 
all attendant circumstances. Conscience 
tells us that we must do right, but the con- 
crete content of the right is not presented to 
us in any abstract table of values. 

With this word of precaution, though, we 
are in a position to say that some truths are 
more nearly absolute than others, and that 
some values are more nearly eternal than 
others. The idea of a moral God and of the 
dignity of a human Hfe are such values; 
while, of course, the idea of God and the 
idea of man are constantly changing in the 
direction of better meanings — we trust. 
Now, there are some men who rise above 
time in that they see the eternal value and 
dignity of human life, let us say. Hilaire 



170 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

Belloc has written of the effect produced 
upon him by gazing upon the Bayeux 
Tapestry. The Bayeux Tapestry is, we 
know, valued chiefly as an incomparable 
piece of historical evidence. Something, 
however, in the lifehkeness of the figures 
and in the vividness with which abiding 
human quahties are set forth made upon 
Belloc the impression that he was gazing 
upon a picture out of relation to the tem- 
poral flow and was beholding truth in a 
degree eternal. Probably this same feehng 
is produced upon a sensitive mind by gazing 
upon any transcendent work of art. We 
forget the mere circumstance of time and 
place as we seem to be peering beyond time 
and place. Who can stand before the 
Sistine Madonna and think only of its set- 
ting as an artistic creation in a given com- 
plex of historic circumstance? The eternal 
in motherhood and the eternal in childhood 
stand out too unmistakably for that. Like- 
wise there are men who appear to us indeed 
to disregard accidents of time and space and 
look upon hfe as inherently valuable and 
eternal. 

We may be permitted here to use an 



THE INDIVIDUAL 171 

illustration which has a current aptness as 
the theme of bitter controversy. Just for 
the sake of illustration let us think of the 
conscientious objector to war. The pres- 
ent writer is neither a pacifist nor a non-re- 
sistant. He has no objection to the final 
resort to physical force for the coercion of 
the evil of will of individuals or of nations, 
for the sake of restraining those wills from 
wrecking society. A distinguished English 
observer who has had wide experience with 
the conscientious objector in war time has 
said that the trouble with most conscientious 
objectors is "pure cussedness"; but he has 
also said that among the conscientious ob- 
jectors every now and again you come upon 
one who is a "veritable angel of light." 
Suppose we do find, then, these angels of 
light among the conscientious objectors. 
What is the explanation? What can the 
explanation be except this, that the objector 
has brooded so long upon the worth of hu- 
man Hfe as such that life appears to him to 
be so sacred that no destructive or violent 
hand should be laid upon it? 

It is true that the objector is likely so to 
ideahze human life as to leave out of account 



172 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

the requisite conditions under which that life 
would get any chance to show its idealism. 
It is true also that such brooding may lead to 
a lack of perspective like that of the poet so 
deeply distressed by the accidental killing of 
a bird that he insisted upon a funeral service 
for hf e that had ceased to be. All such con- 
siderations to one side, however, the fact 
remains that the worst conceivable way for 
masses of mankind to deal with the angel-of- 
light type of conscientious objector against 
war is to howl him down, or throw him in 
jail, or scourge him with lashes. For the 
conscientious objector may see more ac- 
curately than his fellows the worth of human 
life as such, and the inalienable sacredness 
and dignity of life which must be the foun- 
dation stone on which any final society 
worthy of the name is to be built. We are 
not discussing the question, understand, 
from the point of view of pohtical expedi- 
ency. There ought to be some method of 
distinguishing the creature of ''pure cussed- 
ness'' from the ''angel of hght." It will 
never do for society to agree to an intoler- 
ance, in the name of respect for the opinion 
of the masses, which will scream down or 



THE INDIVIDUAL 178 

shut away those who are angels of Hght. In 
all such situations the practical rule is hard 
to find, especially at crises of dreadful na- 
tional stress. It is to be hoped, however, 
that mankind wiU soon become • self -con- 
trolled enough to hsten to the prophets who 
prophesy in the name of the Eternal at the 
instant when the voices of the temporal are 
shouting in deafening uproar. In various 
constitutional enactments society has taken 
good care that the popular impulse of any 
one day shall not override the values of all 
past days. A like wisdom will insist that a 
merely transient feeling shall not drown 
out the words of those who speak for the 
values of eternity. 

But what of all these wild fellows who in 
the name of Christianity rail against every- 
thing we hold sacred? Are we to give heed 
to their incoherent nonsense? Suppose we 
think of them as effects, for the moment — 
effects of a present system rather than as 
possible causes of revolution. It may be 
that through their freakish incoherency 
some disease of the social constitution is re- 
porting itself. Now some diseases can in- 
deed be cured by surgery, but others yield 



174 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

only to the toning up of the whole constitu- 
tion. We should treat some agitation as the 
authoritative pain which reports an inflam- 
mation, and should quiet the agitation by; 
striving for better social health. 



II 



CHAPTER IX 
THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 

In the past five years the events of the 
great World War have lent new force to 
the question as to the relation between the 
church and society, or, perhaps more ac- 
curately speaking, between the church and 
society in the organized governmental 
aspect which we call the state. Has the 
church the right to set its truth in any sense 
above the decrees of the state, especially 
when the state prescribes for citizens courses 
of conduct according to the state's and not 
the church's moral code? What power has 
the church to influence the vast hfe of so- 
ciety due just to the fact that it is a church? 
Questions like these have been raised with 
increasing frequency in recent months and 
will be raised more frequently as the days 
and years go by. 

We must not confuse this issue with the 
older issue of which our fathers thought 
when they spoke of the problem of the 

175 



176 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

church and state. The older problem took 
its first meaning from the time when the 
church under the popes claimed to be even 
in a temporal sense supreme. The doctrine 
of the divine right of kings, which we so 
violently condemn to-day as utter absurdity, 
was in a former age a perfectly legitimate 
and effective weapon against the pretensions 
of the heads of the church. In early times 
secular governments had no very clearly de- 
fined ideas of sovereignty. Kings did not 
base their claims to rule on any abstract 
considerations. The kingship was to a large 
extent a product of circumstances. Groups 
of men simply had to have leaders, and mon- 
archies grew up to meet that pressing prac- 
tical need. The same practical urgency, of 
course, worked in the growth of the au- 
thority of the head of the Roman Church; 
but the Roman Church, skilled as it was in 
creedal definitions, and in emphasis upon 
formal pronouncements, came soon to a 
theoretical justification of the authority of 
the church, argumentatively and philosoph- 
ically founding that authority upon a 
divine command. The pope ruled because 
he was the "vicegerent'' of God on earth. 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 177 

He claimed to trace his authority back to 
the great word uttered by Peter. So that 
over against the kings, big and httle, who 
did not trouble themselves much about 
formal arguments for their sovereignty, the 
pope put his own claim of rule by divine 
right. To meet that papal claim the kings 
fashioned for themselves, or found men who 
could fashion for them, the doctrine that a 
king had as divine a right to rule as a pope. 
Utterly out-of-date as the doctrine of the 
divine right of kings is to-day, it was in its 
time a logical instrument for whose inven- 
tion and use we may all be thankful. 

The conflict in this older form as to tem- 
poral supremacy has been pretty well fought 
through. The Protestant churches would 
not think of laying claim to such supremacy, 
and the Roman Catholic Church has to face 
conditions as they are in a world in which the 
church is not temporally supreme. There 
is, of course, one path along which the 
church to-day might pass into temporal con- 
trol in the actual government of society. It 
is conceivable that by the holding of im- 
mense material possessions the church might 
become very closely linked with that present 



178 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

industrial and economic order which has an 
admittedly undue influence in the conduct of 
all modern government. We would all con- 
cede, however, that such a connection would 
not be inherent in the idea of a church. For 
the purposes of the present argument we are 
thinking of the church as a distinctively spir- 
itual group of behevers with only so much 
material connection with governmental and 
economic systems as to give it a foothold on 
the actual earth. Suppose we think of the 
church from this more exclusively spiritual 
point of view, and ask what its relation must 
be to the pubhc opinion which comes out of 
that large general mass which we call so- 
ciety, and what its relation must be also to 
that definite organization which we call the 
state. 

Let us ask again : What is the church? It 
has been at times popular to make the 
church a substantial existence above and be- 
yond the individuals composing it. We 
have personified the church to such an extent 
that we have made it an entity on its own 
account. We have even gone so far as to 
say that what matters to the individual or to 
a group of individuals is of slight conse- 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 179* 

quence so long as the church is advanced. 
Over against this personification of the 
church to such lengths that the church be- 
comes substantial beyond the persons who 
compose it there has come a reaction which 
insists that the only realities in the church 
are the individuals who belong to the church. 
All the rest is figure of speech, more or less 
useful for rhetorical purposes. 

As is so often true, the essential reality 
lies somewhere between these two extremes. 
There is, indeed, no church apart from the 
believers composing the church. But, on 
the other hand, when individuals join the 
church they cease to be the same as before, 
assuming that their union with the church 
means anything. They enter into a new set 
of group relationships, and in those relation- 
ships they unfold powers different from 
anything to which they would have attained 
as unrelated individuals. In their connec- 
tions with one another they develop forms of 
activity which through the years become 
norms and standards, molding the life of 
successive generations to such distinctive- 
ness of united thought and deed and arous- 
ing such esprit de corps as to afford the 



180 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

justification for our speaking of the church 
as a personaUty. 

Before we attempt to elaborate this 
thought it may be well to point out that we 
are deahng here with the phenomenon of 
group psychology which manifests itself in 
many other relationships besides the ecclesi- 
astical : and which in an earlier chapter took 
so much of our attention. May we be per- 
mitted to repeat that there are industrial 
and scientific and artistic groups which as 
groups attain to distinctive hfe. They are 
all built upon the primary base that when 
we add men to men in any relationship in 
which they are vitally interested we are not 
adding mere things together in the sense that 
2+2=4. The problem is personal and 
dynamic, and 2+2 becomes not merely 4, 
but 10 or 100 or 1,000. Moreover, the re- 
sult is not solely quantitative. In these 
group connections men working together 
find within themselves powers which they 
might never have known outside of the 
group contact. 

This truth is becoming so clearly recog- 
nized to-day as to lead in some quarters 
to a demand for change in the basis of 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 181 

representation in the governing bodies of 
states. It will be, of course, understood 
that we are not expressing opinions on the 
worth of the suggestions as to governmental 
schemes which we use merely for purposes 
of illustration. We may say, then, that in 
England there seems to be a circle of rather 
brilliant political theorists, Hke Mr. G. D. 
H. Cole, for example, who call for such re- 
organization of governmental procedure in 
England that delegates may sit in the su- 
preme councils of the state representing not 
territorial units, but units based upon occu- 
pations. A trade-unionist sitting in Parha- 
ment representing not a geographical sec- 
tion of his country, but, rather, a group of 
workers bound together by a common set of 
daily bread-winning tasks, could, according 
to these theorists, be expected to know more 
about such a group than he would ever know 
about a territorial district. In addition there 
would be, it is claimed, a frankness and 
openness in the delegate's relation to the in- 
dustry that he stood for that might do away 
with some corruptions in poKtics. The chief 
claim, however, is that the representative 
would be speaking out of an intimate knowl- 



182 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

edge of a vital process and out of loyalty to 
others like himself involved in that process. 
This same idea has been worked out into 
philosophic statement by Harold J. Laski, 
of Harvard University. It is the basis also 
of much that Miss M. P. Follett says in her 
work on The New State ; and the conception 
of corporate personaKty here implied is not 
widely different from that of the late Dr. 
John N. Figgis, of the Church of England, 
whose work has done so much to clarify the 
whole question as to the relation of the 
church to the community. 

Are we not all agreed that an expert is en- 
titled to hold fast to his opinion over against 
the clamor of any number of persons who 
are not experts? If this is true, what about 
the authority of a group of persons whose 
organic relationship to one another makes 
them more expert in their particular fields 
than they ever could have become as sepa- 
rate individuals? To go back to the illustra- 
tion of a moment ago, let us assume the ex- 
istence of a trade-union in possession of a 
large body of technical information which 
has been handed down from the past, in pos- 
session also of methods of training those who 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 183 

enlist in a particular industry. Let us as- 
sume that the union is familiar with the 
effects of its industry on the lives of the 
workers, and that it has some conviction as 
to the best way of jfitting the industry to the 
general social demands of a given period. 
Above all, let us assume the play of that force 
of mutual reenf orcement of spirit which de- 
fies ordinary arithmetic. This group of 
workers, then, has a voice which is more 
authoritative in its own sphere than any 
voices outside that sphere. It is true that 
the industry would represent only a body of 
producers, and that the general public might 
be looked upon as a body of consumers. The 
consumers surely would know more about 
the effects on their own purses of the prices 
charged by the producers than would the 
producers themselves. The consumer, in- 
deed, has opportunity of an abundant and 
painful sort to become expert in adapting 
his own means to the charges of producers, 
and out of this experience the consumer has 
his rights about which he in turn can speak 
with an authoritative voice. We are con- 
sidering, however, the union just from the 
point of view of its own rightful realm, and 



184 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

we say that in that reahn the union can con- 
ceivably in its group capacity so speak as to 
carry the weight of authority from which 
there is no appeal to any other organization 
whatever. The members of the industry 
bound together in corporate unity can know 
more about their industry than any other 
group of persons whatsoever. The prob- 
lem, then, of society is just to determine 
whether so authoritative a voice as this is to 
be heeded or not. 

Recent industrial disturbances the world 
over may create in some minds a prejudice 
against an illustration of this sort. Sup- 
pose, then, we lift our thought to the region 
of more distinctively scientific inquiry. 
Here is a group of scientists set on the ad- 
vancement of knowledge. By the very 
body and spirit of their organization, by the 
pooling of their sources of information, by 
cooperation and mutual aid and by the crea- 
tion of an atmosphere of scientific temper, 
which of itself sharpens the eyes of the in- 
vestigator, the group as such may be the 
highest authority in its sphere. To be a 
member of the group means to have access 
to facts and powers not within reach outside 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 185 

of the group, and the organization in its 
corporate and organic capacity speaks with 
a tone that society and the state will disre- 
gard at their own peril. Or, to carry the 
thought one step further, suppose the or- 
ganization were one dependent upon the 
possession of some form of artistic skill. 
Here the members might be so helpful one 
to another as to create an artistic psycho- 
logical climate which would make the organ- 
ization as such authoritative as to standards 
of art. It is significant that the highest 
feat of industry, knowledge and artistic 
power in the Middle Ages — the Gothic ca- 
thedral — was made possible by a guild form 
of social life in which the guild was as vital 
as a living organism. 

It does not subtract from the force of the 
above statements to point out that there are 
inherent and original sins in any form of 
organization. It is charged at once that 
organizations tend to become conservative — 
that they give the wire-puller and manipu- 
lator his opportunity, that they slow down 
the speed of the fastest member to that of the 
slowest. The measure of justice in all this 
may be allowed. It may be conceded also 



186 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

that there are some types of mind of rare 
abihty which have to work alone. But con- 
cession at all these points does not seriously 
qualify the largest claim as to the multiplica- 
tion and transformation of human energies 
through group organization. As for slow- 
ing down the fastest mind to the speed of 
the slowest, it must be remembered here that 
we are deahng not with steamships or ox- 
carts but with minds. It is true that a fleet 
of battleships, to keep together at all, must 
accommodate the pace of the fleet to the 
pace of the slowest boat. In a spiritual or- 
ganization, however, the great speed of the 
faster mind stimulates and quickens the 
speed of the slower to a pace altogether im- 
possible if that slow mind works alone. The 
faster the fast mind goes, the faster the slow 
mind goes also. It may be necessary, when 
a vote of some sort is to be taken, to settle 
by compromise upon a measure more satis- 
factory to the slow mind than to the fast one, 
but group activities are not exhausted in 
taking votes. 

We have drawn this matter out at con- 
siderable length because we look upon the 
church as a group in some measure giving 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 187 

itself to all forms of activity suggested 
above. The Divine Spirit works through 
group psychology as surely as through indi- 
vidual psychology. The church is an or- 
ganic union of workers, set upon bringing 
in the kingdom of God on earth. Within 
her folds the energies of individuals are 
multiphed and transformed by the very 
fitting of each individual to his comrades. 
The church is a fellowship for the pursuit of 
truth, and finds in the fellowship itself the 
conditions which make for discovery of 
truth. In the highest sense, also, there is an 
artistic quality about righteous living. 
There is such quickening of the spiritual 
faculties that the craving for the fine reaches 
out toward the Source of all fineness. We 
all agree at once that if a prophet comes to 
men full of the fire of a new moral vision, 
the society of the time disregards that 
prophet at its own exceeding great peril, for 
the prophet is an authority. But if the 
prophet becomes more prophetic in a union 
with his fellows, is not that union also 
prophetic? 

By this time our question as to the rela- 
tion of church and society begins to answer 



188 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

itself. If we have in the community a 
vitally organized body of believers, doing 
the will of God, and out of obedience to the 
will of God arriving at the discovery of 
truth and attaining to fineness of life, all 
other organizations of society, and society 
itself, must yield to that church the respect 
due to spiritual authority, though the 
authority works through the exertion of in- 
fluence rather than through any material 
force. Even if it be urged that we are paint- 
ing an ideal, the very possibihty that such an 
ideal can be painted is significant for society. 
Assume the church to have proclaimed a 
Christian ideal of God, and a Christian ideal 
of man, and a Christian ideal of man's rela- 
tionship to God and to his fellow man, and 
to the world in which he Kves, society will 
disregard those ideals at its peril — ^to say 
nothing of the peril of opposing the ideals. 
It will not be a just charge against such an 
organization to say that the ideal is well 
enough, but that what we need is practical 
guidance. It will be the business of the 
church to stand for its ideal, even if it can- 
not always suggest concrete methods of at- 
taining that ideal. The church might hold 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 189 

before the scientific world the ideal of mak- 
ing science serve an enlarging human life by 
every conceivable path, while at the same 
time leaving the scientist free to pass upon 
the efiicacy of this or that scientific method. 
The church might stand before society and 
say that cooperative ideals should obtain in 
industry, even if she herself could form no 
adequate plan as to how the ideals could be 
worked out. So in the realm even of the en- 
actment of positive law. To take a single 
illustration, the church might rightly stand 
for an ideal of the marriage relationship 
which would contemplate divorce only in the 
rarest instances. The state might not at- 
tain to the ideal of the church in the enact- 
ment of statute, but the state's impotence in 
this respect would not be in any sense a re- 
flection upon the ideal of the church. 

We said at the beginning that the ques- 
tion as to the relation of church and state 
had taken on new pertinency since the out- 
break of the World War. We had in mind 
the relationship between the ideals of the 
church and the war aims of the various 
fighting nations. It is interesting to note 
in this connection with what sensitiveness 



190 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

some of the nations have tried to avoid any 
conflict between the universal ideals of peace 
for which the church is supposed to stand 
and national ideals to be won by war. Some 
nations have, indeed, claimed that citizen- 
ship in the state makes the citizen so hable 
to fight for any cause that the nation may de- 
termine upon that all concession to the 
church is out of the question. Most churches 
have held that there is no objection to the use 
of force by the state for a righteous cause. 
Some nations have of their own initiative 
sought even in direct war to maintain re- 
spect for the church as a prophet of the 
higher ideals when the church takes a posi- 
tion against war. We may think of the 
mihtary exemption laws in the United 
States, for example, as they apply to mem- 
bers of religious bodies protesting on re- 
ligious principle against any kind of armed 
conflict. Very hkely the average political 
thinker in the United States would maintain 
that the state has right of way over and 
above all religious organizations whatso- 
ever. Practically, however, the exemption 
of Quakers, and other nonwarring sects, 
from the duty of military service is a recog- 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 191 

nition of the distinctive place of the church 
in society as an upholder of ideals, and as an 
authority in the realm of spirit. The ex- 
emption shows the unconscious or subcon- 
scious recognition by the state of the danger 
of impairing the social value of an institu- 
tion which stands for spiritual ideals, by 
compelling it to fight against those ideals. 
The problem has been one of making an ex- 
pedient and practical shift to help church 
and state to get along together, but it has 
been more than that: the state has, after a 
fashion, sought to show regard to the church 
as a witness to an ideal in an unideal world. 
We are not concerned with the abstract 
ethical question as to what an individual 
should do when a conflict conceivably arises 
between the ideals of his church and the de- 
mands of the state. That will have to be a 
matter for the individual conscience. We 
are perfectly clear, however, that in the 
realm of ideals the church as an organiza- 
tion makes a mistake when it compromises 
out of regard either for the momentary 
movement of public opinion, or for state pro- 
cedure which is to the church manifestly un- 
christian. There is no taint of anarchy in 



192 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

this. The essential justice here has been 
recognized from the beginning. We have 
the firmest conviction that the general social 
ideals of a community will, in the long-run, 
affect for good the Hf e of the church ; but we 
must insist that those social ideals, on the 
other hand, are most hkely to take shape in 
a community where a spiritual organization 
stands uncompromisingly for the things of 
the spirit. Freedom in the positive aspect is 
a realization of the largest possibilities in 
one's life. The church is an instrument for 
making possible the largest freedom. And 
when the free spirits are produced they have 
a right to stand uncompromisingly for the 
things that made them free. 

In speaking of an instrument for making 
possible the largest freedom it is manifest 
that we have in mind an ideal church rather 
than any organization to which we can now 
point among the various denominations and 
sects at work in the world Before the real 
can give place to the ideal, or rather, before 
the ideal can become more fully real, there 
must be progress toward a larger and fuller 
church life than we now know. First of all, 
the church must cleanse herself of all the ele- 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 193 

merits which in herself contradict the ideal 
which she proclaims. It may seem hke 
drawing a fine thread of distinction to insist 
that an organized church should not give 
herself to some courses of conduct which she 
may justly leave to the guidance of the con- 
science of an individual when that indi- 
vidual, as an individual, is confronted by the 
questionable course. She must not, in the 
name of an attainment of a desirable im- 
mediate result, surrender an ideal. The 
most important thing for the world is for the 
Christian Church to keep the Christian ideal 
unflinchingly before the mind of mankind. 
It is from this angle that the question of 
some form of church unity is becoming in- 
creasingly important. No one desires that 
dead uniformity in a Christian community 
which might result if any one type of re- 
ligious belief or practice were to prevail to 
the exclusion of every other. On the other 
hand, the unrelatedly separate existence of 
organizations so nearly ahke as the chief de- 
nominations are is fast becoming intolerable. 
We ordinarily hold our discussion of church 
unity down to the need of mere economy of 
effort in practical affairs. We say that 



194 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

some organic form of church union would 
make for the saving of money. AU this may- 
be true enough, but it is a mere beginning. 
We should be concerned with the presenta- 
tion of the Christian ideal, and with authori- 
tative presentation, and with a presentation 
which has size. There should be some kind 
of union which will put back of the Christian 
message the weighty authority of singleness 
of fundamental aim and plan. There is no 
quarrel between the churches to-day; but 
each church is hke a musician in possession 
of a distinctive instrument. The instrument 
may be excellent, and the musician may be 
playing it well, but the effect is not or- 
chestral. At best it suggests just the tun- 
ing up. Church union does not mean that 
one church is to give way to another for the 
sake of its own annihilation or obliteration, 
any more than an orchestral symphony 
means that the flute is to give way to the 
violin, or that both are to yield to the cornet. 
A flute does not cease to be a flute when it is 
played in an orchestra. There may be 
moments in the movement of the musical 
rendition when the flute is the only instru- 
ment heard, just as there will certainly be 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 195 

other moments when the tones of flute and 
viohn and cornet and all other instruments 
will blend in one unified whole. It is only 
in such wholeness that the Christianity of 
the church will attain unto the arresting and 
compelling forcefulness of final religious 
authority. 

Christian knowledge and Christian feel- 
ing rise out of Christian doing. We must 
judge the Christian doing of the will of God 
by the degree to which it issues in knowledge 
and insight. There are still revelations of 
God to come through the church to man- 
kind — revelations awaiting the creation of 
an organ great enough to seize them. Those 
revelations simply cannot come to large au- 
thoritativeness except as a great Body of 
Christ suppHes the sheer vitahty out of 
which the greater truths are inevitably dis- 
cerned. The good, the true, and the beauti- 
ful in the kingdom of God will stand fast 
before the judgment of all mankind when 
they are incarnated anew in one Body of 
Christ which will do for all the world what 
the incarnation of the Son of God did for 
the dwellers in Gahlee and Jerusalem in the 
olden days. We need a massive and splendid 



196 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

spiritual organism — full of grace and truth 
— ^that the common people will hear, gladly 
yielding to a vital authority which is above 
all artificial and transient and fragmentary 
authorities whatsoever. 



CHAPTER X 

THE BOOK OF REBELLION AND 
FREEDOM 

We are searching for the comparatively 
fixed points within which pubhc opinion has 
its highest vahdity as it molds religious 
conceptions. It requires only the shghtest 
f amiharity with the events in our own coim- 
try since 1914 to reahze what an overpower- 
ing might is lodged in the will of millions 
of people when that will becomes unified 
by a great aim. Bishop Gore, of England, 
traveling in the United States during the 
closing months of the World War, spoke 
with alarm of the terrible unity of the popu- 
lar forces in this country. To be sure, the 
unity was an element in the fighting equip- 
ment of a nation entering upon the decisive 
phases of a struggle in which freedom itself 
seemed to be at stake. But such a united 
public opinion raises the terrifying question 
as to what would happen if the sympathy of 

197 



198 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

the people became violently enlisted for a 
bad cause instead of a good one. Even 
fighting, as we believe our country was, for 
a righteous cause, the opinion of the country 
went to extremes, or at least sanctioned ex- 
tremes, out of harmony with the spirit of 
freedom which is supposed to pervade our 
institutions. In the progress of the combat 
most or perhaps all of this could be justified 
as war measure, but there have hngered into 
the days of peace some of the furies and 
violences of the popular sentiment of the 
war days. When popular opinion is lashed 
to a frenzy we need help from every quarter 
to restrain it from breaking through the 
bounds on which the welfare of the people 
themselves depends. 

Even in quiet times there is something 
about the massiveness of the force of pub- 
lic opinion which makes it easy for the 
ordinary individual to beheve that when 
that pubhc opinion has once spoken the de- 
cision is final. James Bryce has called 
attention to the danger that lurks in what 
he calls the fatalism of the majority. Many 
of us feel that when once a majority utter- 
ance of the purpose of a mighty social 



1 



REBELLION AND FREEDOM 199 

group is recorded the point at issue is 
settled forever. The feeling is somewhat 
akin to that with which we regard the out- 
come of a decisive war. We speak of an 
appeal to force and a question settled once 
for all. This is, of course, to forget that 
force may settle justly, or it may settle un- 
justly, a debated question. When the 
Spaniards first came to America they dealt 
so severely with the Indian population of 
the islands that we now call the West Indies 
as hterally to wipe them out of existence — 
all of this with the sanction of sixteenth- 
century Spain. There can be no question 
as to the decisiveness of the result. And yet 
the result itself is a feao'ful blot on the 
history of a so-called Christian empire. 
After the last shot has been fired in every 
war it is possible to ask who was right, the 
victor or the vanquished? We use this 
illustration suggesting physical force be- 
cause so often the decisiveness of public 
opinion is suggestive of nothing so much as 
physical masses, or the weight of numbers. 
Throughout this book we are trying to 
establish the contention that the demand of 
the people is one of the determining factors 



200 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

in the forging of religious beliefs, but we 
must face the facts in the world in which we 
live. The will of the people may be sheer 
mass force — almost brute force. The voice 
of the people at any one time may be simply 
the overwhelming shout of a multitude be- 
side itself. After the people have expressed 
their will, the question remains as to whether 
they were right. 

We have in the Christian Scriptures the 
story of the struggle of a people against 
massive forces, in the name of reUgious 
ideals which have meant everything for 
humanity. The Bible is the record of 
centuries of rebelhon against massive tyran- 
nies in the name of an opportunity for the 
free human spirit. It does not detract from 
the cogency of our argument to say that the 
tyrannies against which the free spirit must 
fight to-day are not the sort of tyranny 
against which the Hebrew prophet fought. 
The spirit of tyranny is ever the same. The 
one tyranny against which the race will 
probably have to fight for centuries to come 
is just the tyranny of the people themselves. 
A multitude can be as autocratic and arbi- 
trary as a king. The majority can oppress 



REBELLION AND FREEDOM 201 

minorities with as deadly effectiveness as 
can an Oriental despotism. The mob can 
revel in the sheer excess of its own might 
just as truly as can a leader of barbarians or 
savages. As long as this tyranny is possible 
in pubKc opinion the Bible will remain the 
classic volume for the defiance of the free 
spirit toward tyranny. 

This will be all the more true as scien- 
tific biblical research increasingly shows 
how the men of the Scriptures were pri- 
marily men of their own times, strugghng 
for freedom in their own day. While it 
may be that the statements of religious 
freedom which come to us in scriptural 
language will be repeatedly charged with 
a fresh content as the generations go by, 
the elements of rehgious liberty, as set 
on high in the Scripture, will be determi- 
native of the struggles of men for religious 
hfe during the days to come. And this will 
be only in harmony with that law of con- 
tinuity which binds the generations together. 
We are coming to see, perhaps more clearly 
than formerly, how thoroughly the ideals of 
scriptural hberty have influenced those who 
have laid the foundations of the free systems 



202 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

under which we now live. It has been 
customary for historians to tell us that per- 
haps the larger part of our modern civil 
hberty is a heritage from Teutonic begin- 
nings — that in those far-off days in northern 
Europe our ancestors met together for free 
discussion in a free assembly, and that out 
of such meetings came assemblies like the 
New England town meeting, and the habit 
of self-determination in the Anglo-Saxon 
group. This is measurably true, we are told, 
but the advance from Teutonic origins to- 
ward freedom has been unconscious response 
to the promptings of an ancestral instinct. 
Granting the strength of such influence, all 
the more strong because unconscious, we 
must still remember that from the years of 
their Christianization our ancestors kept be- 
fore themselves the ideals of hberty set forth 
in the Scriptures, especially in the Old Tes- 
tament. More than once they definitely 
sought to base their government on the 
foundations of the Jewish governmental 
systems. Teutonic influences have moved 
powerfully in the field of the subconscious, 
but above the threshold of consciousness was 
the determination to imitate the scriptural 



REBELLION AND FREEDOM 203 

scheme and to appropriate the scriptural 
spirit. All this is probably an overstate- 
ment, but it has a degree of reasonableness. 
Hebrew history itself begins with a revolt 
against a massive despotism. We are quite 
agreed that the Scriptures as we now have 
them do not give a scientifically historic 
account of the breaking away of Israel from 
Egypt. The narrative as we have it is laid 
down in successive strata, the upper strata 
being the deposit of increasingly religious re- 
flection. The ancient historians were not aim- 
ing so much at exact report as at the revela- 
tion of the presence of God in their national 
career ; but allowing every concession to the 
most extreme school of bibhcal critics in their 
handhng of Israel's experiences in Egypt, 
and Israel's revolt against Egypt, it is 
obvious that the Egyptian experience 
colored all Jewish thought through the 
entire national existence of the Jews. And 
a more astonishing proof of the vitality of 
religious ideals hardly could be found for 
the contemplation of the Jews than the sur- 
vival of the Hebrew ideals in Egypt. Ac- 
cording to the narrative, the Hebrews were 
compelled to labor to the point of utter 



204 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

physical exhaustion; they were required to 
meet the animosity of the other dwellers in 
the land of Egypt; they were loaded down 
with the tyrannies of an apparently irre- 
sistible despotism. In the glorious story 
the Hebrews would not yield. They main- 
tained their own vigorous demand for a re- 
ligion of their own, and finally succeeded in 
breaking away for an independent group 
existence. What the Jews rejoiced in as 
characteristic at the beginning remained 
true to the end. The Jewish conceptions 
were not overwhelmed by the massiveness of 
Egyptian, or Assyrian, or Babylonian, or 
Greek, or Roman power. To be sure, the 
Jews never beheld their national hopes ful- 
filled, but they did nevertheless stand for 
moral and spiritual conceptions on which 
they put their mark forever. Their heroism 
sunk these ideals deep into the world's con- 
sciousness; and if the ideals are never 
washed out of human consciousness by 
the tides of our own later ages, this en- 
during persistence will be due primarily to 
the Hebrew pioneers of religious hberty. 

We do not pretend to give an exhaustive 
list of the Hebrew ideals which we may in 



REBELLION AND FREEDOM 205 

substance think of as always valid, but 
we must mention some. First, all Hebrew 
morality turns round the demand that a 
human being be treated humanly. The 
passionate fury with which the Old Testa- 
ment prophets rage against the inhumanity 
of men toward one another does much to 
enforce everlastingly in our mind indis- 
pensable human values. It will be remem- 
bered that when the pioneer prophet Amos 
burst into invective against the nations 
round about Israel, much of his wrath broke 
upon the inhumanities with which the na- 
tions waged war and treated captives in war. 
These human accents are the glory of the 
prophetic literature. Even when prophecy 
became hardened into statute, and much of 
its glory was smothered under the heaps of 
priestly ritual, the gem of a fine human in- 
sight would every now and again gleam 
forth in the midst of much that was rubbish. 
Amid all the detail as to the wave offering 
and the heave offering in Leviticus, lies em- 
bedded that commandment which Jesus 
picked out as half of his compendious state- 
ment of man's total obhgation: "Thou shalt 
love thy neighbor as thyself." Perhaps it is 



206 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

the fashion to-day too much to decry the old 
Hebraic legislation. Much of that legisla- 
tion, indeed, is to us trivial and inconsequen- 
tial, but the law in which the psalmist medi- 
tated day and night dealt with enduring 
human ideals — enduring even though they 
were enforced in statutes which concretely 
have little or no meaning for us now. The 
aim of the law was to help men to be men, to 
lift them above the animal and brutal, to 
free them from everything unnatural, to put 
them on the path of making the most of 
themselves. Perhaps the contrast between 
the humaneness of the standards of the 
Hebrews and the standards of the nations 
round about has been overdrawn. The 
code of Harmnurabi, for example, is a piece 
of kindly and noble legislation. Neverthe- 
less, there were a primacy and an effective- 
ness and an urgency about the Hebrew ideal 
which have made it a permanent spiritual 
possession of the race. A man must be 
treated as a man, not as a thing of inanimate 
creation or as a member of the brute world. 
It may seem altogether gratuitous to call at- 
tention to anything so rudimentary, but if 
the Hebrew notions now seem obvious and 



REBELLION AND FREEDOM 207 

commonplace, we must reflect that the ideal 
has been made obvious and commonplace by 
the vigor of the old Hebrew law. More- 
over, if we seem to stand firmly upon this 
fundamental, let us take heed lest we fall. 
For the course of the past four years has 
shown that a whole nation can be so swept on 
by a false ideal as to forget the elementary 
considerations due to human beings as such. 
We would not be ungracious in referring to 
atrocities in war. We admit the possibility 
of exaggeration of such atrocities. But we 
must urge that if there were atrocities any- 
where and a prophet hke Amos could have 
beheld them, he would have shouted out 
against them with dreadful anger, proclaim- 
ing that no dreams of empire and no inge- 
nious contrivances of statecraft could atone 
for the violation of an ideal everlastingly 
noble. If such atrocity had been sanctioned 
by th^e vote of millions, Amos would have 
found in that sanction only further reason 
for invective. If it had been replied to him 
that all such atrocities were incident to war, 
he would have hurled back the word that 
such incidents were in themselves a con- 
demnation of war. 



208 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

We have said that the Hebrew law and 
prophecy always called for the treatment of 
a man as a man. We may go a step further 
and say that the Hebrew ideal aimed at a 
man's making the most of himself. The 
Hebrews always fought against any tyran- 
nies that prevented men making the most of 
themselves. We have insisted with weari- 
some frequency that freedom means more 
than dehverance from constraint. It in- 
volves the positive reahzation of the possi- 
bilities in oneself. We cannot help feehng 
that in the struggle for liberty the Hebrew 
kept before himself this opportunity for the 
enjoyment of freedom in a positive form. 
It is instructive to note the attitude of the 
old Jews toward their kings. It is difficult 
for us to imagine that anyone in bibhcal 
days could have dreamed of the possibihty 
of doing away with autocratic leadership in 
the state. But there was in Israel a respect- 
able party which questioned whether it was 
safe to have a king at all or not, and the issue 
always turned round the right of a man to 
do as he pleased within the hmits set by the 
general institutions of Israel. 

Suppose we glance at one or two in- 



REBELLION AND FREEDOM 209 

stances. Naboth and his vineyard have been 
the theme of the preachers against tyranny 
for thousands of years. The request of the 
king for Naboth's vineyard was not inher- 
ently unreasonable. Ahab went much 
further in considering Naboth's interests 
than a ruler of Egj^pt or of Babylon would 
have gone, or even than a modern govern- 
ment with its principle of eminent domain 
might have gone. A municipahty like ours 
might have run a street through the vine- 
yard without asking Naboth whether he 
hked it or not. Ahab offered another vine- 
yard, and he offered a fair price in money 
for Naboth's land. But Naboth refused for 
an inner and spiritual reason. The land 
had been the land of his fathers, and to 
Naboth a sale of the land meant treason to 
an inner loyalty. We note too, as others 
have often done, that when Jezebel secured 
the land by the death of Naboth, she brought 
about the death by a show of formal legal 
evidence that Naboth had sinned against one 
of Israel's spiritual ideals. The very neces- 
sity upon Jezebel to resort to trumped-up 
charges shows the serious limitation put 
upon rulers in ancient Israel by the funda- 



210 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

mental principles of Israel. By the way, 
it is interesting to note that with all this care 
to protect Israel's ideals, Jezebel was the 
one person in Israel who most despised those 
ideals. 

Or recall the revolt of the Ten Tribes 
against Rehoboam. Quite possibly the 
course of Jewish history as narrated in the 
books of the Kings is more complex than ap- 
pears in the account itself. The tribes of 
Israel may have been a more loosely joined 
confederation than we have been accustomed 
to suppose, and tribal separativeness may 
have played a part in the revolt against 
Rehoboam. Taking the narrative as it 
reads, however. Oriental notions had made 
inroads into the centers of power at Jerusa- 
lem. George Adam Smith has pointed out 
that there is a haziness about the history of 
Solomon in contrast with the sharpness and 
clearness of the atmosphere through which 
we look at David. We cannot doubt, 
though, that the features of Oriental despot- 
ism had begun to reproduce themselves in 
the court of Solomon, and that Solomon in- 
tentionally or unintentionally had fallen 
away from the regard for men as men which 



REBELLION AND FREEDOM 211 

had always been fundamental in Hebrew 
sentiment. However it may have been with 
Solomon, the position of Rehoboam is mani- 
fest. Rehoboam hstened to the leaders of 
the Oriental party and with deliberate pur- 
pose announced to the northern tribes that, 
whereas his father had scourged them with 
whips, he himself would scourge them with 
scorpions, and that the weight of his Httle 
finger upon them would be more oppressive 
than the weight of his father's thigh. A 
sharper statement of the poKcy of Oriental 
despotism, as over against the old Hebrew 
policy that the king must be a servant of the 
people, could not be imagined. When we 
reflect that the northern tribes finally were 
lost through evil ambitions in themselves, we 
must not forget that in the beginning they 
chose to sacrifice all hope of national union 
rather than yield to an Oriental inhumanity. 
Going back to a little earlier day, the pop- 
ularity of David, with all his faults, lay in his 
regard for the ideals of his people. And it 
is to be observed that when Absalom sought 
to lead a revolt against his father he began 
by seeking to persuade the people that his 
father had departed from Hebrew stan- 



ai2 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

dards of regard for the rights which were the 
essence of Hebrew hfe. Absalom employed 
the method of the demagogue, to be sure, 
l)ut the secret of all demagogic success is 
that the demagogue makes pretense of ap- 
peal to right. Absalom said to complain- 
ants, "Thy matters are good and right, but 
there is no man deputed of the king to hear 
thee." He expressed an earnest desire that 
suits and causes might be brought before 
himself that he might do them justice. The 
very possibihty of Absalom's speaking thus 
against a king is significant. When the old 
Hebrews undertook to criticize a king, they 
criticized him. They were not held back by 
fears of Use majeste. The strictures upon 
kings in old Hebrew times, if reproduced 
with anything like similar directness in 
criticism of public authorities in war time 
now, would likely lead to imprisonment, if 
they ever got by the censorship of the press. 
The prophets were not without discern- 
ment too of the dangerous forces which 
ahgned themselves behind the pohcies of 
kings. It would be absurd to represent 
that there was in the days of the Hebrew 
monarchy anything like our modern capi- 



REBELLION AND FREEDOM 2ia 

talistic organization, but there were rich men 
and public oflficials who desired to be rich. 
Hence the outbreak of Amos upon the ex- 
travagance of the rich, and upon the pubhc 
officials who would take money for laying 
false or unjust penalty upon the needy. 
Noteworthy in this connection is the con- 
demnation of Amos upon the corrupt public 
systems of Israel for turning the humble out 
of their way. Amos seems to mean that the 
ordinary man in Israel had a right to walk 
in a humble man's way, or to hve in his own 
fashion. The corruption of the time made 
it impossible for the humble man to lead his 
normal hfe. Perhaps no juster condemna- 
tion of tyrannies of all varieties can be found 
than this, that they turn the plain people out 
of the path which they would otherwise 
tread with their own gait and according to 
their own desire. 

Glancing at the other side of the Hebrew 
ideal, namely, the expanding idea of God, 
we can see at least three aspects of this ex- 
pansion, and we can detect how the massive 
insensate powers can militate against such 
an enlargement. At the Babylonian exile 
the Hebrew took a long stride forward in 



214 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

understanding his God as the universal 
Ruler. Through the terrific expedient of 
the annihilation of the Jewish national in- 
dependence the Hebrews were taught to see 
the God who is the Lord of all the nations 
of the earth. They had to think of him thus 
or abandon him. If he is thus the Lord of 
all the earth, he has regard for other nations 
besides those who boast for themselves a 
unique manifest destiny. This is even now 
a hard saying for the nations — this that 
makes God the God of all the nations. Par- 
ticularist national aims at any instant may 
call forth a surge of popular feeling which 
may sweep much universalism out of theol- 
ogy. The various "pan" movements of re- 
cent date, Pan-German, Pan-Anglo- Saxon, 
Pan-French, Pan-ItaHan, have, of course, 
been checked by the war, but back of every 
such movement lies the assumption of a 
superior type of cultural life, including the 
religious element. When such particular- 
ism is in full swing in any nation it is prac- 
tically impossible to get a decent hearing for 
the teaching that God is the Father of all, 
and that the rights of smaller groups are to 
be respected from a Christian viewpoint. It 



REBELLION AND FREEDOM 215 

is possibly not too much to say that the 
modern Christian nations in their financial 
and pohtical contacts with the so-called 
backward nations are not yet within hailing 
distance of the Hebrew conception which 
came out of the exile. Are they within reach 
of the lofty lessons of the book of Jonah? 
A wave of public opinion may sweep any 
so-called Christian nation into war with a 
so-called backward nation at almost any 
day, and do so with an implied claim that 
God is the God of the covetous nation in a 
degree or manner other than that in which 
he is the God of the nation whose territory 
is coveted. Can such wars of conquest ever 
have a beneficial effect upon the develop- 
ment of the idea of God? 

A second element in the expansion of the 
Hebrew idea of God was the progressive 
moralization of that idea. Granted that in 
the beginning God was worshiped as the 
tribal God of the Hebrews, yet it must be 
conceded that the Hebrews taught that he 
fought for the moral aims for which the 
Hebrews fought. With sublime daring the 
biblical authors no sooner discovered a moral 
obligation which they conceived to be bind- 



«16 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

ing on themselves than they taught it as 
binding on God also, until in the end they 
worshiped a self-sacrificing ruler of the uni- 
verse taking the burdens of mankind upon 
himself. As an illustration of this morahz- 
ing process we have only to look at the pro- 
tests of the prophets against the adoration 
of idols. After all allowance for distortion 
and exaggeration in the account of the 
heathen ceremonies in the high places, we 
cannot doubt that these rites partook of an 
immorality altogether incompatible with the 
Hebrew's ideal of worship. And yet these 
downward tendencies could make an easy 
and plausible popular appeal. Our modern 
speech abounds with smooth and seductive 
phrases which would justify immorahty in 
the name of religion. It is conceivable that a 
craze for low gratification might run wild in 
modern nations as such crazes ran wild in 
Israel — making appeal in the name of the 
Highest. Only the steadying influences of 
the Hebrew and Christian ideals could then 
save us. 

Once more, Hebrew religion, especially 
after the exile, advanced to fresh emphasis 
on the sacredness of the individual. As 



_j 



REBELLION AND FREEDOM 217 

Davidson said, the nation perished that the 
individual might survive, though, as we have 
said, this primacy of the individual was char- 
acteristic of Hebrew teaching from the out- 
set. It will be understood that the Hebrew 
never conceived of the individual as apart 
from social ties. The fresh task after the 
return from exile was to build anew the con- 
gregation of Israel, and a congregation is 
not a mass of unrelated units. The individual 
is the only entity in religious life : but the in- 
dividual comes to his largest self in the con- 
gregation and with the neighbors. Here 
again, as we have so repeatedly said, we 
must keep ahve the old Hebrew honor for 
the individual, and that in defiance of any 
and all tyrannies whatsoever, whether those 
tyrannies be governmental or institutional, 
or those of the sheer weight of popular 
opinion. 



CHAPTER XI 
JESUS 

We are considering the forces which in 
the long run may be depended on to check 
the play of sudden gusts of popular feeling 
and to bring men back to those solider 
human values which mankind will in the end 
give the first place. Foremost among such 
steadying factors the Christian puts the 
teachings and life of Jesus. 

It is no part of our purpose to Hnger long 
on the critical questions raised by modern 
students concerning Jesus. We are not 
concerned with the relation of the fourth 
Gospel to the other three, or with the de- 
pendence of Matthew and Luke on Mark, or 
with the possibility of rebuilding "Q" from 
the synoptics. It may be that our actual 
knowledge of the historical Jesus is much 
less than we have been accustomed to sup- 
pose. All our purpose requires is the exist- 
ence in Christian consciousness of a fairly 
consistent picture of Jesus which is strong 

218 



JESUS 219 

enough to influence the thought and deed of 
men. It has been said of Jesus that even 
though we know little about him we know 
that he was such a life as to attract to him- 
self the best in the thought of every age. 
If this is true, the more we reduce the mini- 
mum of certain knowledge about him the 
more we increase the miracle of that spir- 
itual magnetism which through the years 
marshals so much of the best in the world's 
thought and deed around himself as a center. 
The power of Jesus to pull so much around 
himself is no small marvel. 

Taking the picture of Jesus, then, as we 
find it in the Gospels, and as it has more or 
less thoroughly mirrored itself in the con- 
sciousness of the believers, we see first of all 
a Mind which looked upon man as he is. 
One element of the knowledge of Jesus is 
seldom questioned, namely, his knowledge 
of human nature. And that knowledge 
combined two main features — a recognition 
of the actual sinfulness and weakness of 
human nature and an unfaltering confidence 
in the perfectibiKty of human nature. This 
is not to fasten upon Jesus a belief in the 
total depravity of man on the one hand, or in 



220 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

the possibility of character-transformation 
by magic on the other. He simply saw the 
facts of human life as they are — that men 
are weak, but that they can be made strong; 
that they are sinful, but that they can be 
made righteous; that they are selfish, but 
that they can be made unselfish. 

Now, it is at these two points that super- 
ficial movements of popular thought are apt 
to run to excess. Every little while some 
prophet arises who tells us that the diffi- 
culties of modern society are in no sense due 
to human nature, that they are the faults of 
the system in the midst of which we live. 
Such philosophers call themselves optimists 
in their view of human nature. And their 
optimism is clearly intelligible as a reaction 
from the stupid and deadly theory of human 
depravity which once prevailed. But no 
optimism is sound which does not take ac- 
count of facts as they are — the facts of hu- 
man nature as well as of institutions around 
us. The view which we are considering may 
have some justification for rousing men to 
take a hopeful attitude toward themselves. 
A first step toward making a sinner into a 
saint may be to call him a saint, but the 



JESUS 221 

sounder method is always to take account of 
the facts. 

There is nothing in human history to 
warrant the doctrine that mere change in 
institutions will necessarily change the inner 
purpose of men. We give abundant space 
to the significance of institutions for hu- 
man development, but the popular thought 
which now and again sweeps toward some 
institutional reform with the assumption 
that with that reform achieved the millen- 
nium will be at hand is apt to fall back, 
after the cause is won, to tragic disappoint- 
ment. We cannot wonder that masses of 
men get impatient with the slowness of hu- 
man progress and clamor for wholesale 
change of institutions. Present-day institu- 
tions do sadly stand in need of change ap- 
proximating almost to wholesale, but the 
transformation of the inner purpose of man 
is that other side of the shield which the true 
follower of Jesus will always keep in mind 
when pubhc opinion moves so mightily 
toward a promised goal of institutional 
reform. 

On the other hand is the tendency of pub- 
lic opinion in dealing with situations in 



222 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

which human nature shows itself as pecu- 
liarly obstinate to give up the problem as 
hopeless. Then we have cynicism and 
brutahty as the final outcome. When the 
white men first came to America they found 
the Indians unwilhng to dig gold for them. 
Out of the urgency of the white man 
on the one hand and the unwillingness of 
the Indian on the other came a behef of 
the conqueror that the Indian was hope- 
lessly depraved — fit only for extermination. 
Perhaps the greatest single stain on the 
history of the white race was the resulting 
brutahty of whites. If it be urged that 
the real difficulty here was the system under 
which the whites worked which gave them 
such a thirst for gold, and the system 
which they put upon the Indians, the reply 
is that a mere change of system would not 
have made the whites any less avaricious 
or the Indians more Christian. The prob- 
lem here is one of fundamental human 
nature. The system was, indeed, wholly 
and inexcusably bad, but the evil of the 
system came out of the human passions of 
the whites and the human weakness of the 
Indians. All this has point to-day from 



JESUS 223 

the doctrine popular among many exploiters 
that the peoples in the so-called backward 
lands are so hopeless as to justify the use of 
sternest measures. 

Another element in the teaching of Jesus 
which is at the same time unpopular for the 
short run and adapted to the deepest needs 
of mankind in the long run is the exaltation 
before men of an apparently unattainable 
human ideal. It would be indeed a hard 
critical problem to cut out of the New Testa- 
ment the ideal of moral perfection which 
Jesus set before men. "Be ye perfect, even 
as the Father in heaven is perfect." If the 
Christian consciousness did not hold firmly 
to the belief that Jesus said this, it would 
have been rejected long ago as a tantahzing 
mockery of human hopes. This is the kind 
of ideal that men at first cast aside with im- 
patience and afterward embrace as the sum 
of wisdom. Nothing so disheartens men at 
first glance as an apparently impossible 
ideal ; and nothing so surely holds them fast 
at the end. 

The ideal of Jesus for whole-hearted 
service of God with perfection as the moral 
goal carried with it by implication what 



224 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

Jesus openly avowed, namely, the unselfish 
service of one's neighbor. It is here that the 
emphasis of Jesus on the distinctly human 
values becomes so marked and it is from the 
point of view of this emphasis that we have 
to consider the worth of social institutions. 
We said a moment ago that the mere change 
in the institutions cannot transform the 
inner purposes of man. We meant that the 
expectation of a speedy cure-all through 
change of institutions is doomed to disap- 
pointment, but that does not detract from 
the seriousness and earnestness of the essen- 
tially Christian belief that Christianity has 
not done its work until social institutions are 
Christianized. And that does not mean that 
we can expect speedily to reach a state where 
the social institutions stand finally Christian- 
ized. We can expect, however, to see the in- 
stitutions move toward a more and more 
Christian goal. The test is formally an abso- 
lute one, though in actual content the ideal 
constantly expands. The essential question 
for a social institution is: what is its effect 
upon men stated in the largest conceivable 
human terms? Does it make for the largest 
liberty not merely in the sense of freedom 



JESUS 225 

from constraint, but also in the sense of help- 
ing men to make the most of themselves in 
the highest and best terms? 

May we say at the outset that the attitude 
of Jesus toward the institutions of his time 
was at the beginning kindly? He did not 
move out into hfe looking for something to 
smash. He seemed willing to put the best 
construction on the facts that the facts 
would allow ; and his criticisms aimed not at 
destruction but at upbuilding. His test, 
however, was always to ask what would be 
the result of the institution in its effect on 
the people with whom it worked. 

We look first at the attitude of Jesus 
toward the church. We are thinking of the 
church now in its more institutional features, 
as an organization working under a system 
of rules, with a set of formal behef s in mind. 
The real fact about any church is the people 
that compose it, but we are thinking now 
more particularly of a "system." Even in 
dealing with the purely institutional fea- 
tures Jesus did not speak in unqualified in- 
vective. It was the sight of the altar fires 
and the sound of the chanting of the priests 
which helped awaken the consciousness of 



226 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

the youthful Jesus to a reahzation of his own 
high destiny — and Jesus never to the tragic 
end took himself out of the church of his 
time. 

But his criticisms went deep. From the 
parable of the good Samaritan it became ap- 
parent that a man might be a better man and 
neighbor outside the church than in it. That 
simple parable is a fearful warning to all 
organizational religious systems. What do 
they amount to in terms of neighborliness 
and simple manhood? It is significant here 
that at first glance the judgment of Jesus 
seems to run counter to popular thought. 
We often hear that a real religious system 
makes an appeal to the eye through ec- 
clesiastical insignia — that the leaders of re- 
ligion should take advantage of all those 
aids which give them standing before the 
people. The priest and Levite did all this. 
It might have made the ordinary passer- 
by on the street smile to hear the Samaritan 
put ahead of the priest; but this is one of 
the judgments that the people in the long 
run will sanction. . 

So with the criticism of Jesus implied in 
the word that the Sabbath was made for 



JESUS 227 

man and not man for the Sabbath. To a 
thoughtful and conscientious worshiper fit- 
ting man to the Sabbath rather than the 
Sabbath to man was indeed an unspeakable 
hardship ; but it hardly could have been so to 
the ordinary man. These Pharisaic ab- 
surdities had back of them not merely the 
mechanicalizing and externahzing tendency 
of Pharisaism itself, but also the pressure of 
superficial demand. Roman Catholicism in 
our own time draws out its legal require- 
ments to an extent which seems to suggest 
ancient Pharisaism, but these minutely de- 
tailed laws meet the superficial demand of 
that large element in any body of worshipers 
who want things settled so that they may 
know just what to do and what not to do. 
So also with tithing mint, anise, and cima- 
min. The Master's suggestion of the 
garden owner counting out every tenth leaf 
of mint for the temple while neglecting 
judgment and mercy and truth is perhaps as 
close as the Gospels come to humor, espe- 
cially of the caustic kind. But the tithing 
of mint, anise, and cummin is at first glance 
and for the short run the popular doctrine. 
It is easier to step out into the garden and 



228 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

count the leaves than it is to weigh judgment 
and mercy and truth. A just feehng for 
perspective is one of the latest Christian 
virtues in the order of its dawning in the 
heart and mind. "Blessed are the pure in 
heart," said Jesus, "for they shall see God.'' 
The Pharisees taught that those should see 
God whose Hves were ceremonially clean. 
That doctrine was more popular than the 
doctrine of Jesus, but the doctrine of Jesus 
looked ahead to the great spiritual discipline 
out of which the seer's purity would come. 
This doctrine of discipline was no more im- 
mediately popular than doctrines of dis- 
cipHne are now. Jesus judged all these 
mechanical laws and found them lacking in 
genuine human result, though meeting the 
immediate desires of multitudes of wor- 
shipers. 

How Jesus himself treated the doctrines 
of the church can be seen by a glance at 
his treatment of Jewish apocalyptic. That 
Jesus thought in terms of apocalyptic there 
can be no manner of doubt. He was a Jew, 
and apocalyptic was in the air he breathed. 
Now, apocalyptic was popular. It meant 
the triimiph of the Jew in a national sense, 



JESUS 229 

and the exaction of the last ounce of tribute 
from the enemies of the Jews. It is a com- 
plete misreading of apocalyptic to make it 
the queer and curious puzzle-making of 
schools of rabbis out of touch with real hfe. 
The rabbis are indeed out of touch with oxir 
life when they deal with apocalyptic, but 
the rabbis of two thousand years ago were 
not out of touch with the hfe of their own 
time. Apocalyptic kept burning an almost 
fanatical fire of patriotism in the hearts of 
the Jews. Professor F. C. Burkitt has 
shown how Jesus modified an element in 
the apocalyptic of the gospel day. The 
splendid judgment scene in Matthew 25 is 
based on the Book of Enoch, but while the 
Book of Enoch deals only with the spectacu- 
lar and nationalistic triumphs of the Jews, 
Jesus introduced into the apocalyptic frame- 
work those distinguishing human touches — 
the reward for giving the bread and water 
and the coat — which have made the picture 
one of the great classics in the human values 
for all time. And yet the transformation at 
the hands of Jesus hardly could have been 
popular at their first utterance. The ardent 
patriots would have objected that Jesus had 



230 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

toned down or taken the edge off the Book 
of Enoch. 

The entire subject of the relation of Jesus 
to the Messianic thought of his time is still 
clouded with uncertainties. Enough is 
clear, however, to warrant us in saying that 
the changes which Jesus made in Messianic 
doctrine were not in the direction of making 
the doctrine more immediately popular. 
Jesus introduced hard sayings into the doc- 
trine in the name of the larger human out- 
come. Go back to the threadbare theme of 
the temptations of Jesus in connection with 
his efforts to lead his people. Possibly the 
force of each of the temptations lay in the 
certainty with which the tempting plan 
would please the people. Each promised a 
shortcut and a quick result, as immediately 
seizing and holding the aroused spirit of the 
people. 

It is in the realm of methods that the 
temptation most often comes to yield to that 
clamor of the multitude which is transient 
and fleeting as over against those weightier 
human demands of generation after genera- 
tion. No great difficulty is Ukely to be ex- 
perienced in leading a social group to adopt 



JESUS 231 

a definitely Christian final goal as compared 
with the difficulty in persuading the group 
to proceed at once by a definitely Christian 
method. To meet the impulse to feed the 
people with bread by saying that man shall 
not hve by bread alone is maddening to a 
crowd wild for quick results. But distinctly 
spiritual results are not satisfactorily 
reached by any but spiritual methods. 
While bread means more to the average man 
than almost any other fact of his existence — 
since bread-winning requires the best part of 
all his waking hours — the grant of larger 
amounts of bread will not necessarily bring 
the higher bread. And this is not to forget 
the fact that, taken the world over, the most 
urgent need of mankind to-day is more 
bread. It is a matter of getting at things in 
the right order. More bread is Hkely to 
follow the search for the things of the spirit 
than more of the spirit to follow from the 
granting of more bread. This all looks very 
clear when we gaze back to gospel days, but 
perhaps not so clear when the temptation 
comes to us to-day to let down from the 
glory of a spiritual ideal for the sake of 
irmnediate material result. 



232 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

So, again, with the temptation to use 
pohtical means for the sake of advancing a 
spiritual ideal. It is, of course, possible to 
use political means without bowing down 
and worshiping the devil; but there is inevi- 
tably so much keeping company with the 
devil that the fineness of saintly manner is 
lost. War, for example, promises such quick 
result for righteousness that a war for right- 
eousness becomes popular — especially with 
the saints above the draft age ; but except in 
those cases where war is resorted to in order 
to resist the brutal use of force itself and 
make appeal to force less Hkely in the future, 
the after years pronounce war a failure as a 
means of spreading righteousness. On the 
whole and in the main, war is the devil's own 
instrument, and the devil knows better how 
to use it than the saint does. 

Finally, there is the temptation to hurry it 
all along by leaping down from the pinnacle 
of the temple — capturing the imagination 
of men at a single dash. This is the method 
of sensationahsm — of blazing lights and 
overwhelming thrills. But it has slight 
human value in the end. The only way to 
get into the lower levels of popular under- 



JESUS 233 

standing— if they are lower — is to go down 
the stairway step by step. For the only 
reason for going down is to get the people 
up. 

By this time more than one reader will 
have lost all patience. This is nothing but 
the same old stuff that rich men and reac- 
tionaries and upholders of the established 
order always talk: Let the work be inner 
and spiritual! It will take a long time, and 
while it is going on we will keep tight hold of 
the present order! The order may not be 
ideal, but it will last during our time. It 
breeds nothing but disturbance to inveigh 
against it. 

We should reflect long and carefully 
on the fact that the only man that Jesus 
ever called a fool was a rich man, and 
the only men he ever blazed out upon 
with invectives were the holders of spe- 
cial privilege in his own day. There is 
nothing more exasperating in the range of 
modern experience than the complacency 
with which upholders of an admittedly un- 
just industrial or political system will prate 
about reliance on a pure gospel and the use 
of distinctly spiritual methods. What all 



234 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

such system-upholders need is to reahze that 
the obligation is as truly upon themselves as 
upon anyone to give themselves to things of 
the spirit. It would be folly to attempt to 
prove that Jesus inveighed against wealth 
in itself. He does not seem to have been in 
the least degree an ascetic, but he did not fail 
to call attention to some moral perils in- 
volved in the use of wealth. In aU the con- 
tacts between man and man which the 
possession of any sort of privilege made pos- 
sible Jesus was careful to bring the use of 
the privilege to the test of the human result. 
If money is force, it is the prolongation of 
the power of the man who holds the money. 
He is as much responsible for making his 
money-contacts with his neighbors spiritual 
as for making his handclasps and his words 
and his immediate personal deeds spiritual. 
Dives in the parable is a picture of a man 
who is rich in this world's goods and in noth- 
ing else. All he wanted in this life was 
sumptuous food and fine linen. All he 
wanted in the place of torment was not for- 
giveness based on a changed attitude to 
Lazarus, but water for his burning tongue. 
To get back to the theme immediately in 



JESUS J835 

hand, we must recognize that the inevitable 
slowness of movement in the kingdom of 
God will put the Christian system at disad- 
vantage in popularity as compared with 
some others which promise a speedier result, 
but the ages, rather than the age, will ap- 
prove the ripened work. And here again 
there will be opportunity for inner disloy- 
alty which will try the souls of the righteous. 
For just as some will misuse the fact that 
the Kingdom comes by a spiritual process to 
decry every effort to deal with an unjust 
material system, so many of the same type 
will protest against any hastening of the 
ripening process in the name of the slow 
growth of the Kingdom. But with all his 
rehance upon the slow changes of the 
months and the years Jesus was not a pas- 
sive waiter on events. The closer we get 
back to the first gospel representations of 
him the more we discern a certain imperious 
urgency. After the long wait of the years 
it appears to him that only the last words of 
strong call are necessary to precipitate the 
crisis which will usher in the new day. Jesus 
not merely waited for the ripening of events ; 
he sought to ripen them. He would hurry 



236 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

the harvest, hke all the prophets before him. 
Readers of the Old Testament will recall the 
suggestiveness of the expression that Amos 
was a presser of the fruit of his trees. The 
fruit would not ripen except after pressure. 
And Amos did the same for Israel: he 
hastened the ripening of events, though, like 
Jesus after him, his pressure was always 
spiritual. 

It remains to say that Jesus introduced 
into the hf e of the world the ideal of human 
hfe which men everywhere are coming to 
reahze as final. This does not mean that 
the ideal is final in the sense of standing in 
static stillness, but final in the sense that 
life is final, showing forth the abundance 
and fineness and energy and steadiness of a 
personahty which we take as our aim. Our 
understanding of Jesus constantly expands, 
or, rather, without looking to him to see 
what he would do in a particular moral crisis, 
we seek to test our spirit by his, which leaves 
us with the resolve to use our own freedom 
to find the last ray of light upon the prob- 
lem and the last ounce of moral strength 
for its proper handling. There can be 
nothing final about the Christian's moral 



JESUS 237 

life except the unshakable devotion to Christ 
at its center. The concrete duties them- 
selves are relative, absolute as the abstract 
law of good will may be. The Christian 
life is one continuous effort to carry the 
Christ spirit into all human relationships. 
This is not as popular as a system of duties 
fixed and unchangeable, but only with an 
expanding ideal of this kind can we hope for 
a real kingdom of God. 

He came that we might have life, and 
might have it abundantly, but life meant to 
him the direction of all the energies into the 
highest channels. He might have met 
larger response if he had preached the grati- 
fication of the lower impulses in the name of 
abundant life. Other leaders have done 
that and have at last gone down before the 
judgment of mankind. The Christ idea is 
to bring every impulse under subjection to 
love of God and love of one's fellow men. 
And greater than any body of teaching to 
set this ideal forever in the consciousness of 
men has been the hfe of Jesus himself. 
Little as the critics may think that we know 
about him, what we do know makes us cer- 
tain that he accompUshed the twofold 



ass PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

miracle of utter love of God and complete 
service of man, or, rather, that he made his 
love for God known in a service of man, 
which for moral fullness and depth of wis- 
dom and vastness of energy is the chief fact 
in the realm of human ideals. Greater than 
anything he said and did is what he was. 
And he who seeks to be hke him will have to 
pass below the popular cries of a particular 
day to find those everlasting human values 
upon which he sought always to build. 



CHAPTER XII 
THE CHRISTLIKE GOD 

What gives Christianity its permanent 
power, however, is not merely the ideal hu- 
man life as revealed in Jesus. If that were 
all, the world might indeed be forever grate- 
ful for Christianity, but Christianity would 
be more a set of ethical maxims than a re- 
ligion. The peculiarity and the strength of 
Christianity is the behef that in Christ we 
see not only what man may become, but what 
God is ; and in this latter phase of the Chris- 
tian revelation the heart of mankind is more 
deeply satisfied than in the former. 

As in the problem of Christ as man we 
were not concerned especially with New 
Testament criticism, so in the problem of 
Christ as of God we are not overmuch busied 
with so-called apologetics. We shall, in- 
deed, have something to say of skepticism in 
a moment, but we are not about to launch 
upon so futile an endeavor as to try to prove 
formally that God is like Christ. The idea 

239 



240 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

has not been lodged in the minds of the race 
by formal argmnent. We are moving in the 
sphere of behef and faith. Enough for our 
present purpose that the positive disproof 
of the Christhkeness of God is impossible. 
On the whole and in the main, an essential 
characteristic of human nature is the prone- 
ness to put upon everything the best con- 
struction possible. It is not human to begin 
to doubt everything at the start. We 
doubt, indeed, but only after we have been 
deceived. We assume that our neighbors 
tell us the truth until we detect them lying. 
Some cynics have said that this is nothing 
but that constitutional good-humor which 
comes welling up from subconscious depths, 
deceiving mankind; but even so, the cheer- 
fulness is part of human nature and must be 
reckoned with even in theistic argument. 
This is not flying against reason nor in the 
face of facts. 

In spite of all the hard features of the 
universe common sense asks if it is never- 
theless possible to beheve in the God of 
Christ, and, finding that it is possible, con- 
tinues to beheve. Granting all the diffi- 
culties of abstract argument in the thought 



THE CHRISTLIKE GOD 241 

of incarnation, humanity still asks, ''What 
kind of life would God live if he became 
man?" — and, finding that question abun- 
dantly answered in Christ, turns the formal 
arguments over to the theologians. If the 
theologians could prove such a thought of 
God absolutely impossible or directly con- 
trary to historic fact, that would be another 
question; but abstract thought can do noth- 
ing of the sort. Since the time of Kant it 
has not been formally within the reach of 
argument to prove that the God of Christ — 
or any kind of God, for that matter — exists ; 
but it has been equally impossible to prove 
that he does not exist. In a realm so wholly 
one of behef we take sides ; and we may well 
believe that in the question as to the Christ- 
likeness of God humanity will take the best 
side. 

We pass to consider some ideas about God 
which now and then take on great actual 
force in the mind of the people, amounting 
at times almost to popular craze. In this 
way we shall find some of the deeper de- 
mands of the human heart on which the be- 
lief in God ultimately rests. And first of 
all we notice those occasional gusts of athe- 



242 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

ism that break on the human mind. Some 
such storms arise when large sections of the 
pubhc are confronted for the first time in a 
terrible or overwhelming fashion with the 
hard features of the present order: was it 
not Voltaire who used to say that the Lisbon 
earthquake made atheists by the scores of 
thousands? It will be remembered also that 
after the French Revolution had advanced 
into shameful excess popular representa- 
tives abolished God by vote. But such cases 
are not true to the steady and normal 
process of human thinking. When men see 
their fellows go down into death by droves 
and swarms they think of a cheap humanity 
and a cheap God — or no God at all — ^until 
they think a httle further. We are not seek- 
ing to dodge anything, certainly not the 
hard aspects of the order in which we live; 
but these hard aspects have been here since 
the first man. In an age-long contempla- 
tion of them the race has nevertheless come 
to behef in a good God — ^to too strong a be- 
hef to let go of God because of some striking 
or spectacular manifestation of the power of 
forces which work every day. Men have 
been f amihar with death too long to allow 



THE CHRISTLIKE GOD 243 

the fact of an unusual incident of death to 
shake them completely from belief in God, 
So far as the death of the individual is con- 
cerned — and the individuals are the only 
ones who die — instant death by a natural 
catastrophe may be more merciful than long- 
drawn agony in one's own bed. Death 
which wipes out whole families spares the 
members the distress of separation; and 
death which touches great numbers broadens 
the area of sympathy, which makes for a co- 
operative bearing of the sorrow. These are 
not wholly satisfactory reflections, but they 
are such as fill the consciousness of the 
greater groups of men on second thought. 
What men think in time of storm is seldom 
final. 

A second type of popular thinking would 
insist that the only really popular rehgious 
attitude is a species of indifferentism. We 
are to do the best we can in this hfe and let 
any other life take care of itself. Why 
worry? If we do the best we can, we shall 
be prepared for another life if there is one ; 
and if there is not, it makes no difference. 
Such would-be guides tell us that the ordi- 
nary man thinks very Httle about God or 



244 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

freedom or immortality. He is too busy, or 
too tired, or not interested. The only re- 
ligion necessary is one of mutual good will. 
If aflfiiction comes, time will heal the woimd 
and the longest night will seem short after it 
is over. 

This conception can be so put as to seem 
the very height of common sense. Prob- 
ably most of us have at moments felt just 
this way; but not many of us feel this way 
always or for long. Wilham James used to 
say that he personally felt very httle interest 
in the problem of immortahty, but he wrote 
a most attractive book about it, and in the 
end came to brood much over immortality 
and kindred themes. There is much similar 
inconsistency in men. In the long run the 
question about God and his thought for men 
comes irresistibly and inevitably into the 
consciousness of mankind, in defiance of 
what seem to be the peremptory voices of 
practical and work-a-day philosophy. 

Another type of popular thought would, 
indeed, accede to the Christlikeness of God, 
but would not really face the hard tough- 
nesses of the universe. It would boast of 
gazing upon good rather than upon evil. In 



I 



THE CHRISTLIKE GOD 246 

the last war we learned that the most harm- 
ful sort of propaganda was that which told 
the truth — and never anything but the 
truth — but which picked the facts to be told. 
In the end the peoples would rage at being 
deceived. So will it be with any type of 
religion which will not face all the facts. 
Jesus faced the facts. If we are to beheve 
in a ChristHke God, we shall not win uni- 
versal dominion for that God by any sort of 
foohng ourselves, or by calhng things by 
any other name than that which belongs to 
them. It does not make any difference how 
restless the multitudes become over the in- 
sistence that we look at the facts; we must 
look at them if we are to secure the final 
support of that final multitude that no man 
can number. Popular puttings of religious 
truth sometimes urge us to fashion for our- 
selves the world in which we hve. The raw 
material is all around us ; we are to pick out 
only the good. The good man looking out 
upon hfe sees only the good: the bad 
man sees the bad. Now, the aim in all this 
is clear, but the God of Christ must be the 
God of things as they are, as well as the God 
of the things to come. We may put it down 



246 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

that the human mind will not long be satis- 
fied with any type of easy religion — no mat- 
ter how large and loud the applause which 
may at first greet such rehgions. The doc- 
trine of the Christlike God means nothing 
without the cross ; and whatever else we may 
say about the way of the cross, we hardly can 
say that that way is easy. 

If the acceptance of the ChristHke God 
means wilHngness to accept facts, it also 
means willingness to accept severe duties 
and disciphnes. How anyone can see in 
Jesus an amiable well-wisher is something of 
a mystery; but some cry out for the 
amiabihty of a well-wishing God, an indul- 
gent Father laying no heavy burdens upon 
the consciences of his children, especially no 
heavy biu^dens of responsibility for the wel- 
fare of the less favored children. Yet if 
there is one thing sure about the temper of 
the human mind, it is that that mind will not 
long be satisfied with a merely well-wishing 
God. President Eliot once said that the 
best type of father is the one whom the 
children respect more than they love. As 
we said in an earher section, the love of God 
is naught, or worse than naught, if it is 



THE CHRISTLIKE GOD ^47 

not based on a foundation of sturdiest 
righteousness. 

In the parable of the diJSFerent kinds of soil 
the Master told of the shallow soil overlying 
the sohd rock. In such soil the seed takes 
hold quickly and springs up at once, to the 
great joy of the inexperienced farmer, de- 
lighting his heart with the prospect of an 
early harvest. But the experienced farmer 
knows better. He knows that this ready re- 
sponse means early withering. Jesus seems 
to have clearly in mind the hard-heartedness 
of a quickly responsive emotionalism. The 
hardest-hearted, most disappointing people 
on earth are the amiable, well-wishing emo- 
tionalists who love with an outgoing gush of 
affection which soon dries up. Better have 
the taskmaster God of the Pharisees, pro- 
vided only he be fair, than to have the God of 
Christianity if the love of the Christian God 
be just easy-going likeableness. In the 
long run the people would rebel against such 
a God. If God is a hero, himself bearing 
a cross heroically, men will at last crown 
him Lord of All; but if the cross is merely a 
sign of Fatherly good-humor which will put 
up with everything, and forgive and forget 



248 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

everything provided only that the children 
think well of the Father, the children will in 
the end rebel. 

Another characteristic of a so-called 
popular religion is its insistence upon posi- 
tiveness of a certain definite stamp, the 
firmly fixed standard. We spoke of the 
movement in the preceding chapter. We 
speak of it again in this broader relationship. 
It is characteristic of certain moods of the 
popular mind to insist upon a yes-or-no 
answer, upon a word that closes the case, 
upon an infalhble standard. The emphasis 
upon the relativity of some divine standards 
that we once thought were hard and fast has 
created widespread discontent among be- 
lievers who want all problems settled once 
for all. We all know that the popular 
leader must make unqualified statements, 
Positiveness is a prime requisite for one who 
would lead the masses; and positiveness 
must be an outstanding mark of any re- 
ligious system which really commands men. 
It is possible to put this aspect of the truth 
very convincingly, but in the long run the 
larger Hfe is not with the closed system. 
Some critics hostile to Christianity have 



THE CHRISTLIKE GOD 249 

taken advantage of this human craving for 
finahty to attack the Christian system, avow- 
ing that the historical student has under- 
mined the foundation of the faith by show- 
ing that every phase of Christian teaching 
has been relative to a definite set of historical 
circumstances — that Christianity is not ab- 
solute but altogether relative, etc. But 
there has not been any school of criticism 
hardy enough to claim that Christianity is 
not a historical fact. Christianity is here as 
an actual positive force, accompHshing 
definite results in history. The absolute 
phase will not concern us much if Christi- 
anity proves adequate to any historical crisis 
which arises. 

The real problem is not as to whether 
Christianity is absolute or not, but as to 
whether it is adequate or not. And we sub- 
mit that a hving spirit at work in the world 
moving freely toward a lofty spiritual ideal 
is more hkely permanently to satisfy the 
heart of man than any set standard, no mat- 
ter how fixed and final that standard may 
seem. Infalhbihty of statement in the 
Scriptures is not so important as inexhausti- 
bihty of meaning and of hfe. InfaUibihty; 



250 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

of church decrees is not in the long run so 
mighty with men as the cmrent of quicken- 
ing inspiration which abomids in any church 
worthy of the name. 

We must admit that modem criticism has 
made many good people believe that Chris- 
tianity is in a bad way through the doing 
away with standards absolute in the old 
sense. The plain man of the street feels 
that something is wrong. But the fact is 
that we never had any of the old infaUi- 
bihties. We said we had them, but we were 
forced to admit that with our differences of 
interpretation of infallible books and in- 
falHble dogmas we were practically in the 
same plight as if we had admitted their 
relativity to start with: even the utterances 
of infallible popes are capable of quite smug 
adjustment to varying situations. We have 
always treated sacred institutions in this 
living way. Why not admit the fact and 
continue to do so with our eyes open? On 
the whole it is best to trust in any community 
to the men who are most aHve ; and freedom 
makes for hf e. 

It is quite the fashion to charge Christi- 
anity, again, with having yielded to the 



THE CHRISTLIKE GOD 251 

popular philosophy of the day, namely, 
pragmatism. In trying to avoid the easy 
method of rehance upon appeal to an arti- 
ficial, almost a mechanical standard, we may 
ourselves have seemed to fall into this op- 
posite extreme of yielding to a superficial 
pragmatism* Just what pragmatism is we 
confess ourselves unable to say, after 
twenty-five years of study. Perhaps Mr. 
Dooley hit off the popular understanding 
of pragmatism fairly accurately when he 
said that truth is whatever you can cash it in 
for and get for it on Saturday night. The 
critic says that Christian pragmatism is be- 
lieving whatever will make us feel happy, or 
whatever we think will be good for us with- 
out any regard for historic or scientific fact 
whatever. There may be a popular rehgious 
pragmatism of this sort, but such a system is 
far from what we have in mind. 

Making all allowance for the common- 
place truth that both in history and sci- 
ence the student sees very largely what 
he wishes to see, we nevertheless insist 
that no religious system can be ultimately 
accepted by men which blinks or dodges 
any fact whatsoever. We must hold our 



@62 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

understanding of the origins of Christian- 
ity open to all the corrections which scien- 
tific research may estabhsh as necessary. 
We must face the situation in the realm 
of nature exactly as telescope and micro- 
scope and spectroscope and test-tube re- 
veal it to us. A fact must be treated as a 
fact and as nothing else, though the upholder 
of Christianity, like everyone else, has a 
right to protest against having every sort of 
guess thrust upon him as a fact. Treating 
facts as facts, however, the interpretation of 
facts is another matter; and in that process 
of interpretation quite another factor may 
enter besides the merely factual. One man 
may make a longer leap into the realm of 
faith from a fact basis than another may, 
but the length of his leap may indicate more 
spiritual energy than has he who prides 
himself in keeping nearer the facts. Popu- 
lar judgment is not finally on the side of the 
intellect that is too matter of fact. \ 

And when we are speaking of facts we 
must always remember that there are inner 
facts as well as outer. In the realm of faith 
the inner feehng of security and satisfaction 
is a fact, a fact that shines forth from the life 



THE CHRISTLIKE GOD 263 

and makes its impression on the world of 
facts. Popular decision sooner or later 
judges beliefs by the effects on the lives of 
those who profess them. It sooner or later 
brings into the field of view the question as 
to what spiritual meat this or that life feeds 
which makes it what it is. The authority of 
a belief is not so much the formal ground 
for it in strict logic as the result which it can 
produce in the realm of the personal. In 
speaking of one of his friends William 
James said that this friend gave himself 
more and more to a belief in personal im- 
mortality and became handsomer every 
year. Allowing for the picturesqueness of 
the James rhetoric, we have here an appeal 
to the consequences of belief as an argument 
for the validity of the behef . When we say 
of Jesus that he is an authority upon the 
character of God we may not have any ap- 
peal to strict logic in mind. We may mean 
that his behef in God made Jesus the man 
that he was. In this sense it may well be 
that the behef in the Christhkeness of God 
is pragmatic, but not pragmatic in the sense 
of closing the eyes to facts in the world of 
events or things. 



254 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

Does the belief in a Christlike God make 
the believer Christhke? This is the argu- 
ment which will make the final appeal to the 
judgment of the larger masses of mankind. 
The proof of Christianity is the Christian. 

But pubhc opinion must be heeded when 
it declares that the existence of Christians in 
the individual sense is not enough to prove 
the worth of the doctrine of a Christlike 
God. There is the threefold challenge of 
an evil industrial, international, and racial 
situation. If the doctrine of the Christhke 
God can Christianize these relationships, the 
triumph of Christianity will rest on the basis 
not of theoretical soundness merely but of 
historic importance. We repeat that the 
essential question as to the historical vahdity 
of Christianity is not so much a matter of 
the past or of the present as of the future. 
Can Christianity be made in the larger sense 
a historic force? It is admitted that the 
Christian doctrine of God has produced high 
types of individual character moving within 
the limits of conventional and accepted mo- 
rality ; but too often the tragedy has been that 
the most devout of such individuals has not 
been able to see that the Christian doctrine 



THE CHRISTLIKE GOD «56 

of God has a significance for the wider rela- 
tionships. 

There hardly can be any doubt that 
Christianity has as yet barely touched the 
industrial and international and racial re- 
lationships. Within certain spheres com- 
petition is well and good, but how Christian 
is it in the struggle for daily bread? Cooper- 
ation must replace competition in industrial, 
international, and racial contacts. In the 
field of missionary endeavor the chief ob- 
stacle to the spread of the gospel is not the 
nature of the native or the character of the 
missionary, but the glaring contrast and con- 
tradiction between the preaching of the mis- 
sionary idea and the actual practice of the 
national group out of which the missionary 
comes. Christianity has yet to meet this 
final test before the vast masses of the race 
will vote for Christianity, Can Christianity 
make cooperation and mutual aid take the 
place of competition in industry? Can 
Christianity make international good will 
take the place of armaments and threats of 
war? Can Christian missions really work 
out a practice of brotherhood for all races 
together? If this cannot be done, thinkers 



256 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

here and there may hold to the behef in the 
Christian character of God, but the mass of 
men will pass the belief by as unimportant. 
The most essential question about God is as 
to whether God is Christian or not. That 
can be made clear to the masses only by the 
way the Christians act in these larger rela- 
tionships. Industry involves that struggle 
for daily bread which engrosses the most of 
the waking hours of the vast majority. In- 
ternational and racial relationships mean the 
possibihty of war to death for ourselves and 
our sons. The general good sense of man- 
kind is right when it insists that if the Chris- 
tian doctrine of God cannot be made to bear 
fruit in Christianizing such realms, it is not 
of large consequence as to what else it can 
do. 

We wish to say as we draw to a conclusion 
that common sense always asks not merely 
as to the kind of instrument we have for the 
accomplishment of certain ends, but also as 
to the power at hand, or within reach, for the 
desired purpose. We believe that in the 
doctrine that God is like Christ we have an 
adequate dynamic for individual and social 
redemption. A materialistic sociahst won 



THE CHRISTLIKE GOD 257 

much applause a little while ago by saying 
that his only interest in Jesus of Nazareth 
was in his being a carpenter. ''Only in so 
far as he was a carpenter is he of interest to 
the laborer," said he, which shows that even 
the sociahsts do not always know the secret 
of social djTiamic. Assuming for the sake 
of the argument that it is possible to be- 
lieve in the God of Christ, could there be 
anywhere found a mightier spiritual force to 
put back of social reforms and transforma- 
tion? 

At this point we are again directly chal- 
lenged by the statement that as a matter of 
fact scores of effective social leaders to-day 
are not beleivers in God at all and yet they 
work with a passionate devotion to himaan 
welfare which would go even to martyrdom. 
They stand out in forceful contrast to many 
professed believers in the Christian God who 
choose the way of smug adjustment. All 
of which we openly concede. The old ex- 
treme putting of the dependence of indi- 
vidual character on behef we cannot sub- 
scribe to. It is not true that if we pull up 
every doubt we find a sin at its root. There 
does indeed abound more faith in some 



258 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 

doubts than in some of the creeds. It is un- 
questionable that many social leaders do 
fight vahantly for the cause of mankind. It 
is an abominable slander to say that all 
doubts come out of evil hearts. Much doubt 
comes out of rage against a total system 
which seems set against man. Much comes 
of the manifest inadequacies of organized 
Christianity in the face of the social evils. 
Much comes also from the fact that many of 
the doubters have never heard Christ 
preached in any other than a dogmatic insti- 
tutional sense. It is possible for a man 
whose own heart is filled with a spirit of 
Christ not to recognize the formal, doctrinal 
Christ of some dogmatic preaching. 

But conceding all honor to the men who 
without formal behef in the God of Christ 
nevertheless act in the spirit of Christ, we 
must cling to what seems to us clearly mani- 
fest — the belief that only by trusting in the 
God of Christ can we get force enough to 
carry through the great social transforma- 
tions. If the whole universe is set against 
us, the requisite faith will be worn down and 
frittered away. The social enthusiasms of 
men are not so much hkely to be upset by 



THE CHRISTLIKE GOD ^59 

terrible shock as to be eaten into or dissolved 
by the heaviness and prosaicness of the task 
itself. Very often the most socially minded 
men are most individuahstic and self-reliant 
in their work. They go ahead without much 
sign of response. But in the end the people 
must carry the task through ; and they need 
the dynamic of spiritual reenforcement. 
We believe that there is such dynamic in the 
thought of the Christian God. All the 
world loves a hero. The God of the Christ 
of the cross is heroic. If God is not what 
Christ reveals him to be, he falls below the 
heroic level. If he is not what Christ re- 
veals him to be, there are men on earth who 
are better than he is. But in the absence of 
direct proof to the contrary we may beheve 
that earthly heroism is but a faint ghmmer- 
ing of the heroism of God. As men catch 
the significance of the heroism of the Christ 
of the cross as reveahng the thought and 
purpose of God himself, the springs of 
energy will be opened up which will make it 
possible for the peoples themselves to fashion 
a new social heaven and earth. 



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